We sat ourselves down in the loft, Lisa and Alec slipping on their AR-linked glasses as I pulled up half a dozen different windows in front of us, each displaying the rudimentary user-interfaces of random forums buried in the depths of the matrix, renting the processing space of larger hosts that specialised in licencing netsites.
The others each had a single site in front of them, each one a utilitarian forum cultivated by some niche sub-community and each having a duplicate on mom’s list of suspect sites. I had six sites in front of me, but I hadn’t yet allowed myself to slip completely into cyberspace, staying in AR with the rest of them.
In anticipation of a long evening, Brian had ordered in from an Amazonian place nearby, the coffee table in the middle of the living room laden with fries mixed with cheese, meat and just about anything else. I was still famished from my digital vision-quest and eagerly picked at an oversized polyester carton that I’d claimed all for myself even as I scrolled through the sites, a woodlouse resting on my shoulder in case I ran across anything interesting.
‘Interesting’ was perhaps the wrong word, to be honest. Most of the posts were generally innocuous enough, usually just responding to whatever was in the news at the time or whatever fake ‘scandal’ the users had managed to whip themselves into a frenzy over.
The sheer amount of posts was hard for me to work through, but fortunately we didn’t need anything too old. Gangs could get pretty mobile when they needed to, as the ebb and flow of territorial disputes combined with the occasional police raid or CorpSec clampdown to drive them out to new territories. We needed something active.
The national boards were no good, either. They had the right people but the wrong scale; much too big to draw in local traffic or latch on to all but the biggest of issues, and their size meant they tended to draw in the more mainstream humanis types, not the local lunatic gang members we needed.
Still, all the data was useful in helping me build up a picture of the people using the sites. I paid particular attention to duplicate usernames, where someone was active on more than one site, and then narrowed that down to the ones who split their focus between local and national forums, rather than the ones who just lurked on the national and global ones.
I was looking for people who were interested in metaphobes in their local area; the ones who might want to meet up with like-minded individuals. Once I had the subset I wanted, I broke the data down further by checking the names to see if they lured any users from national boards who later became local users. They were the ones most likely to be gang recruiters.
I looked at the raw data as much as I could, skimming over the actual content of the sites in favour of pure numbers and subsets. Inevitably, however, I’d trimmed all the fat I could and had to work on the real meat of the issue; identifying which of the posters were the most likely to be in the Chosen by looking at what, exactly, they were saying on the boards.
There weren’t any shortcuts I could take here, no clever tricks I could pull with the data. I just had to manually scroll through six different comment histories at once, each filled with slurs and racist rhetoric.
I could handle that – I’d certainly heard my share of it in Winslow from fourteen-year-old boys who thought it made them look edgy. Few of them had said it to my face, though; I was much taller and stronger than them, after all, even if I knew that actually getting physical wouldn’t have ended well.
What I couldn’t handle were the people who seemed to actually put some thought into what they were saying, even if their twisted thoughts were moving down pathways that I found absolutely obscene. I found it hard to look at some of them, distracting myself by grabbing another handful of fries from the table.
When I saw a five thousand word long post about how goblinisation was the product of a super-soldier programme and the internment camps back in the twenties were nothing more than an excuse to gather the soldiers into training barracks, I winced reflexively and looked away from the AR window, focusing on the floor of the loft before building up the nerve to look back.
When I saw x-ray images of a troll that was meant to ‘prove’ the theory, I flicked the window shut and leant forwards in my chair, rubbing my temples.
“You okay?” Brian asked, a worried look on his face.
“I’m fine,” I replied, quickly, leaning back and turning my attention back to the windows, but I just couldn’t bring myself to read anymore right now.
I blinked, slowly, and let out a sigh, flicking the article in question over to Brian’s view.
“It’s just… It’s not easy reading, I guess. I’ll be cool, though, just need a sec.” Digital information gathering was my area of expertise, after all. I didn’t want to let the team down.
I could see Brian scrolling through the ‘article’ with a placid expression on his face, only the slightest tilt of his eyebrows giving away any emotion at all.
It took me a while to figure out why he was able to just shrug it off like that, but then I remembered what I’d seen when I crossed the event horizon. We’d lived different lives.
Growing up, I’d always been surrounded by dockworkers. For the most part, those were the people I interacted with – whenever dad had to come into work to sort something out, he’d leave me with a creche or just let me wander the offices knowing with absolute certainty that I was safe amongst their company. I wouldn’t have really called any of them friends – if nothing else, it was very rarely the same kids each time just because of how big the organisation was – but it wasn’t like I’d had many friends in the first place.
I was always aware of mom’s political work, of course, but she tended to discuss it in much the same way she talked about her literature classes, and I guess I always saw it in those same academic terms. It was different seeing everything she fought against laid bare before me.
But Brian didn’t grow up amongst dockworkers, and he hadn’t spent the last two years shut up inside with the worst parts of the world closed off from his own personal echo chamber. What had been rare, scary incidents for me growing up were just a part of life to him. Part of the world. No wonder he’d picked up a gun and started shooting back.
“Did your parents goblinize?” Brian asked after a while.
“Dad was second generation,” I replied, shaking my head. “Mom goblinized when she was about eleven, though. Her parents were human. I guess I’m lucky they decided to do right by her, rather than falling into this kind of thinking.”
Growing up so much larger than everyone else in my class had been hard enough. I had no idea what mom must have went through, to have suddenly and violently changed like that when she was going through puberty. My grandparents on dad’s side had it worse, though. I couldn’t imagine what it was like for grandad being dragged away from the love of his life and stuck in some government camp, half-starved by its contracted management until someone finally realised that goblinization wasn’t some transmissible virus but the coming of the sixth world.
I turned my attention back to the screens, taking a deep breath before diving back in. So far, I hadn’t had any luck. There were plenty of incriminating posts, plenty of bragging about stuff they’d like to do, but nothing deeper than that. Everything was still public-facing, still dragging in random kids out to act out their edgy fantasies in a space where there were no bigger, stronger, classmates who might object.
There were plenty of people who cheered on the Chosen, or acted as apologists for their crimes, and plenty of others who said they knew people in the Chosen, or showed off the snarling wolf tattoo they had hidden under their sleeves, but nobody in the gang itself.
Maybe they just don’t spent much time online, I thought.
“Hey, Taylor,” Lisa spoke up. “I think I’ve got something, but I’ve hit a wall. Could you knock it down for me?”
“On it,” I said as I mirrored her display in front of me, glad of the distraction.
From the look of it, Lisa had honed in on one particular name on the list – NHSapiens – and quickly honed in on the patterns I hadn’t been able to spot. A quick glance at her history showed that she’d been focusing exclusively on the local news board.
Inevitably, those boards were mostly talking about us. Not us directly, of course, but the heat we’d drawn down on the city. There were a lot of people in the city whose quiet little racist bubble had been so rudely popped by the protestors marching on the streets below their window, and Lisa had managed to find a mod that was expertly sifting through that crop of anger, separating the wheat from the chaff and dropping oblique references to a group for people who wanted to ‘do something’ about the issue.
Which was where she’d hit the wall. A firewall, more specifically. A login screen to an entirely private group that the mod managed, and one whose invites he’d been slipping into people’s DMs for the last few days at least.
With a thought, the woodlouse alighted from my shoulder and began picking away at the window, slowly working away at the password protection on the site. The security wasn’t anything special, but there wasn’t any reason to tempt fate by rushing things. Instead, I simply watched – a soda can in hand – until the login screen was replaced by a wall of plain-text messages.
“I’m in,” I said to Lisa, as I looked through the text.
If there was any doubt over whether we’d found the right place, I was quickly reassured by the private room’s custom banner, proudly displaying the snarling metal wolf that was so common in Chosen iconography. The posts at the top of the thread, made by the same mod who’d invited everyone in, just sealed the deal.
Unauthorized duplication: this tale has been taken without consent. Report sightings.
»The trogs are marching through our fucking streets and someones got to beat them back. You all got invites because you looked like you wanted to take action, not talk about it. If that’s wrong, fuck off.«
- TuskCollector (Admin) (23:24:13/25-2-2070)
»Your lucky. Normally you have to know someone to get in, and you have to be blooded by killing a mutant, but we need bodies and we need them now. So were holding trials at the fighting pits, casting out invites to every dangerous motherfucker out there and only taking the ones who make it through. Jumping some old halfer bitch in an alley might make you feel big, but the Chosen only has room for real fighters. You think you can’t stand up, fuck off.«
- TuskCollector (Admin) (23:24:43/25-2-2070)
»You make it through, your in the gang on probation. That means we don’t know you, we don’t trust you. Not until you’ve fought next to us, side by side on the streets. You’ll be put in squads and you’ll do what the fuck your squad leader says. You want special treatment, think we should be begging to have you in, fuck off.«
- TuskCollector (Admin) (23:25:09/25-2-2070)
»You get the fucking picture. Any questions?«
- TuskCollector (Admin) (23:25:15/25-2-2070)
At the start, there had been about four dozen people in the group, but that dropped by half thirty minutes later when the admin kicked all the ones who hadn’t been engaging on the grounds that they were ‘fucking around.’ The remaining two dozen were then tested on their commitment to the cause, largely done by a call and response of different slogans aimed at revving them up. Again, the ones who weren’t engaged were kicked until only about eighteen users were left in the group chat.
I could see the marks left by a Decker who’d used the call and response to conduct a quick IP check on the remaining users, making sure they were all in the Bay area and kicking one user who’d somehow found his way into the group from Philadelphia. Their work was sloppy, but serviceable – a far cry from the tightly-woven network the Yakuza had used when we were looking into them.
The remaining seventeen users were then given an address to meet at and a time to get there. It was a warehouse on the edge of the New Estates, near the Trainyard. A quick check revealed that the building was abandoned, with the land owned by a developer that hadn’t done anything with it yet. In a few years, they’d probably get around to turning it into another megabuilding for low-income workers.
“Oh yeah, this is a goldmine,” Lisa said, a smile on her face. “Hey Tay, can you show the others?”
With a thought, I had the information up in front of everyone, and I’d overlaid the address on a map that hovered over the coffee table.
“I think this is the best chance we have,” Lisa said, her eyes still latched on the window in front of her. “It’s a party with violence, and a party with violence needs drugs and alcohol to grease the wheels. What’s more, it’s an official event, which will increase the likelihood the drugs were smuggled out of Medhall. They’d want their best stuff to sell the new guys on the lifestyle, and it doesn’t get better than pharma-grade.”
“But we can’t just storm it,” Brian pointed out. “There’ll be dozens of guys there, at least.”
“Maybe more,” Lisa nodded, frowning. “From the look of it, this isn’t the only batch of recruits being brought in.”
“Could put my Crawler in there,” Rachel said, gesturing at the warehouse. “It’s an open space on the plans, but if they’re using it for fighting pits they’ll have modified it.”
“And then what?” Regent asked. “Listen for conversations, hope we get lucky? We’d have more luck going in with astral projection.”
“I don’t know if there’d be anything to see,” Brian said. “The Chosen are magophobes as well as metaphobes. They don’t have any mages.”
“We need to be in there,” Lisa said, her brow furrowed in frustration, before she looked up at me. “Do you think I could pass for human? If I styled my hair the right way, or something.”
“For human?” I replied, thinking. It just didn’t fit. Lisa’s features were too sharp, a little too otherworldly, but people could do a lot with makeup. “Maybe?”
“But you couldn’t pass for Chosen,” Brian spoke up. “Alec couldn’t either. You’re too soft. No offence.”
“Not everyone’s into meatheads,” Alec retorted, shrugging his shoulders.
“Rachel could do it,” I said, before my brain caught up with my words.
“The fuck?” the woman in question asked me, her cybereyes whirring in what might have been shock.
“No, that…” Lisa began, a contemplative look in her eyes. “That’s not a bad idea.”
I nodded, my mind still replaying footage of her running back through the woods, surrounded by dead and dying gangers, even as my eyes drifted over the gunmetal grey of her mechanical arms, the camera optics mounted in her skull, not even trying to mimic the eyes she’d replaced them with.
“Yes, it is,” Rachel retorted. “I don’t fucking ‘infiltrate.’”
“But you could.” Brian pointed out, warming to the idea. “Rachel, we’ve taken the job. We need this.”
“Not this way,” Rachel shook her head, standing up. “I shoot through problems, not talk through them. You come up with a plan that isn’t fucking stupid, you let me know.”
She stormed off, heading down the stairs to her workshop. None of the rest of us talked for a few moments, while Lisa was looking at me with a contemplative look. After a few moments, she stood up.
“I’ll go talk to her, see if I can win her around.”
“You’d have better luck squeezing blood from a stone,” Alec retorted, shrugging his shoulders before sighing. “Guess we’re back to square one.”
“It was a good idea, Taylor,” Brian said, as Lisa sat back down. “Rachel’s just happier as muscle. She prefers to let her drones talk for her.”
“And she doesn’t trust people who talk too much,” Lisa adds with a melancholy half-smile. “She doesn’t know how to tell when someone’s messing with her, and that makes her feel like she’s always being messed with.”
I frowned, looking back at the chat logs and the floor plan of the warehouse. Talkative or not, this was the only workable plan we had. Either Rachel went in or we were stuck on the outside – or considering the unthinkable task of attacking an entire gang in search of information that might not even be there.
I thought back to everything I knew about Rachel – everything I’d seen in the Event Horizon – trying to think of some way of getting her on board with the plan. In the Matrix, I reached out to my still-active connection to Rachel’s personal area network, watching through her cybereyes as she worked on her half-finished Steel Lynx.
I suddenly realised that she hadn’t turned that connection off once since she’d opened it on the very first day we’d met. Back before coming to Brockton Bay, she’d been betrayed by her gang and gone on to live a solitary life, immersing herself in the network between her and her drones.
I looked through her eyes again, seeing the machine gun mounted into the cybernetic arm she was currently using to hold a soldering iron, and I suddenly realised what she’d done to survive after being roped into the gang.
Her mind is in the network. Her body is just another gun-platform.
Not literally, of course. Her control rig was wired directly to her brain, but the brain itself was still in her skull. But she’d cut herself off from the world like I had, only her network was a lot smaller than the matrix. She was happy in there, and had spent a hell of a lot longer alone than I had. When she had to interact outside of that closed loop – when she had to talk to other people, other networks – she shut down.
No wonder she wouldn’t even consider it, but maybe I can work with this?
“I’m gonna have a go, see if I can talk her around,” I said, standing up and making my way over to the stairs.
“You’re crazy,” Alec observed, smiling, as I hesitated at the top. Ultimately, though, we needed this to work. I needed this to work.
So I descended the stairs, my feet ringing out on the metal with every step. Sure enough, Rachel was still working on her drone, hardwired into its CPU as she worked her way through its software. When she saw me, it wasn’t through her body’s eyes but through the partially-assembled optics of the drone.
“Fuck you,” she spat the words out.
“Rachel-” She cut me off.
“You want to come and bug me to change my mind. Well fuck you. You’re not coming into my space, getting in my business, to make me do or say anything I don’t want to do.”
Instinctively, I half raised my hands, a placating expression on my face, before I stopped myself. That wasn’t how Rachel thought, and if I was being honest with myself it wasn’t how I thought either. Stuff like tone, stress and sarcasm didn’t mean anything to her. Any inflection was taken as the same aggression Werewolf had used when he spoke, and she’d always associate offers of help with tricks designed to entrap her in slaved networks that weren’t hers to control, with real or metaphorical kill-switches held by someone else.
I had to communicate with her in the way that left the least room for misinterpretation. That, at least, was something I was very familiar with.
I spoke in pure text, overlayed on the constantly scrolling changelog that occupied the top left corner of her heads up display.
Rachel frowned, but didn’t say anything. I took that as an invitation to continue, using my voice but trying to keep it as neutral as possible.
“I don’t understand the engineering behind it,” I said with a nod to the Steel Lynx, “but I do understand code. It’s pretty amazing how well you’ve been able to adapt the stock software to fit your rig. With the right parts, it’ll be as responsive as a limb. More, even.”
“Drones are easy,” Rachel grunted. “Software does exactly what I want, when I want it to.”
“But it still needs directions from someone,” I said, letting the woodlouse appear in her view. “That’s a killing machine, this is a sprite made to crack systems, but both of them are useless without someone telling them what to do.” It wasn’t entirely true – the potential autonomy of my sprites was something that had been running through my head ever since I crossed the horizon – but it was what she needed to hear.
“Your body is the machine we need, and your memory has the experience that’ll help sell the lie,” I said, “but it doesn’t have to be your mind at the controls. You don’t understand people, but Lisa does. I can link her in; she can guide you through it.”
“Lisa talks too much,” Rachel retorted. “I can’t trust her in my head.”
“You trusted me,” I replied. “First day we met. Got me wondering why.”
“You made yourself useful,” Rachel replied slowly, a frown appearing on her face. She clenched her fist, slow enough that I could hear the whine of the artificial tendons hidden beneath her metal palm. Centring herself, maybe.
“And I’d do it again,” I said. “Watch the Matrix while your eyes are on meatspace. Rein Lisa in, if it comes to that.”
Rachel just stood there silently, and I decided not to say any more. I couldn’t see more words doing any good; I’d presented my best argument as expediently as I could, and now the ball was out of my court.
“Alright,” Rachel finally said, turning back to her drone. I fought to suppress a smile. “I’m in. You tell the others.”
“Got it,” I nodded, turning on my heels and making my way back up to the lounge, where Brian, Alec and Lisa were still sitting around the coffee table.
They looked up at me as I sat down, with unreadable expressions on their faces.
“She’s in,” I began, bluntly. “Lisa, I’ll link you into her network so you can guide her through it. Wear the VR headset from Alec’s console so that you can see what she sees with no distractions. You’ll tell her who to talk to, where to look, but be as succinct as you can. I’ll run overwatch in the matrix.”
“Holy shit, Taylor,” Brian said, a grin spreading across his face. “How did you pull that off?”
“I figured it out,” I said with a shrug, not willing to go too deep into it.
“Well, good job,” he continued. “It kind of sucks to sit this one out, but I think you three can handle it. And if not, me and Alec will go in guns blazing to make a distraction so Rachel can slip out in the confusion.”
“Works for me,” Lisa smiled, then turned to look at me. “Hey, Taylor, can we talk? Go over the plan a little?”
“Sure,” I replied, standing up and following her as she led me into the kitchen area. “What’s up?”
“Just one question,” she said, leaning against the countertop and looking up at me with her arms crossed.
“What the fuck was that?”