The I95 was a clogged artery of a road; twelve lanes separated by a two metre tall metal barrier and filled to bursting with a myriad of vehicles, each performing their own function like cells in the bloodstream.
The outermost lanes were the domain of fat-bellied eighteen wheelers that were themselves dwarfed by elongated road trains whose dozen single-container carriages were pulled along by immense wheeled engines. When the train reached its junction, those carriages would decouple – each becoming a self-driving pod that carried just enough charge in its battery to bring the containers to their final destination.
In the middle lanes flowed a diverse stream of traffic, where panel vans rubbed shoulders with expensive suburban SUVs and beaten-up old junkers laden with the accumulated lives of the desperate inter-state migrants driving them. Each of them was engaged in a constant jockeying for position; throwing themselves into any gap they could see in order to advance a few metres further down the endless line of sixty mile an hour traffic.
None of them dared to enter the innermost lane, however, where the vehicles were almost blurs as they passed at over a hundred miles an hour. That was the domain of those who hit the road for pleasure, rather than necessity. The junkers in that lane had been fitted with overclocked engines and daubed in garish decals, while the supercars of the ultra-rich cut through the air like ethereal spaceships one plane removed from the physical reality of wind resistance.
I jerked back reflexively as an entire Go-Gang sped past with the doppler-shifted roar of three dozen Japanese motorcycles, each one carrying a biker wearing anything from slick-skinned cooler suits and all-encompassing helmets to short shorts that flaunted implanted musculature and tattooed dermal weaves that had clearly been chosen to match the bike. Out of the whole gang, only about half had both hands on the handlebars. The rest had at least one holding a weapon of some sort, from snub-nosed submachine guns to a length of pipe that one biker used to knock the wingmirror off the car in front of us.
We’d just passed the junction with Route One, where the Ninety-Five turned west to skirt at a comfortable distance from what had once been the limits of Boston and its suburbs. The city had long since burst its banks, absorbing one town after another as the founding settlements of the American Revolution were overshadowed one by one under the aegis of their larger neighbour.
Brockton Bay was the only city I’d ever really known. It had always seemed so large, so teeming with life, but driving through Boston forced me to come to terms with the fact that it was still just a city. The Boston Area Metropolitan Complex was a sprawl; an urban area that had slipped its ancient bounds in a period of uncontrolled growth in all directions, from the outskirts that surrounded us to the floating arcologies permanently moored in Massachusetts Bay.
Periodically, we passed under the shadow of immense slab-sided megabuildings that rose like monoliths into the skyline, each housing a small fraction of the five million people who called the Metroplex home. They were uncommon in this part of the city, however; Boston’s intelligentsia preferred to live away from the cramped sprawl of the city’s heart and they couldn’t afford to live in its preserved historical centre. Instead, they dwelt in innumerable gated communities of suburban homes and low-rise buildings that contained condos, not apartments, all of them linked to whatever corporation owned the neighbourhood and the people in it.
It wasn’t the sort of place that most of us would ever have been able to touch. Rachel’s van felt empty without Brian sitting up in the front, his statuesque back and impressive height casting a literal shadow on the rest of us. Aisha wasn’t close to her brother’s size – or my own, for that matter – but it still felt like she took up twice as much space in the back of the van.
She’d spent the whole journey alternating from shifting in her seat to leaning over the front seats, to pacing the back of the van and getting far too close to Bitch’s immaculately-ordered mobile workshop. It was enough to make me sympathise with my parents for what they must have put up with when I was a toddler.
And she just wouldn’t shut up. The drive from Brockton Bay had only been about an hour and a half, but Aisha had somehow managed to talk through all of it. When she wasn’t just venting her every idle thoughts into space, she was chatting to Alec about anything and everything. If I’d thought they’d hate each other, I’d been proven horrifyingly wrong; they got on like oil and fire. I knew why Aisha was so lively, of course. I could have replicated the effect by putting a cat in a box and taping the lid shut.
“You seriously couldn’t have sprung for some better seats back here?” Aisha loudly asked as we pulled off the I95, abruptly changing tack from where she’d been whispering to Alec about… something. I didn’t want to know what.
“No point,” Rachel answered, succinctly, before Alec pulled Aisha’s attention back – literally grabbing her chin and pulling her head back to face him. Maybe her wandering mind was starting to wear on him like it did me? Rachel had been holding up well, all things considered; she’d simply chosen to focus on the road while trusting me to keep Aisha away from touching anything important.
Aisha does have a point, I thought to myself. These canvas seats might be good enough for jarheads in the back of helicopters, but not for long drives down the interstate.
“We’re almost there,” I said, partly to distract myself from how uncomfortable I was. “Lisa, are you ready? Today’s your show, after all.”
She stretched a bare arm behind the backrest before turning her head to look at me, reaching up to brush her hair back behind her pointed ear.
“Honey, I was born ready.”
It was amazing how much she resembled the worst, most cliquey people back in high school, and yet how the sight of her triggered none of the same emotions in me. “Well, you certainly look the part.”
“It’s in my blood,” Tattletale answered with a flawless and – fortunately – completely fake air of superiority. “How about you? This is uncharted territory, right?”
“It’s all the same matrix,” I bluffed. Truthfully, I had no idea what to expect; I’d never visited Boston’s grid before. When the matrix covered the whole world, destinations that were within driving distance didn’t appeal anywhere near as much as Paris, New York, Hong Kong or London.
Beyond that, I had no idea what kind of opposition I was going to be up against. Far from warning me, I felt like all Calvert had managed to achieve was to put me on edge with his talk of AI and his callback to DEUS. The way he’d spoken about that entity had rattled me most of all; DEUS was a matrix legend, but Calvert had casually mentioned his name as if his existence was an undeniable fact.
Boston was the graveyard of that would-be-god, according to the rumours. What was certain was that the East Coast Stock Exchange in Boston had been the epicentre of the Jormangund Virus that had killed the old matrix, as well as being targeted by one of the fifteen nuclear-fuelled electromagnetic pulse bombs that had crippled the wired network’s physical infrastructure.
The official line was that the crash had been caused by a terrorist doomsday cult, but rumours said that all of that destruction and death had been nothing more than a desperate attempt to avert DEUS’ plan to forcibly connect all the world’s supercomputers into a single node that would fuel the AI’s apotheosis. The attempt had failed, or so the rumours said, and DEUS had died along with the old matrix.
It wasn’t just Calvert’s conviction that made me believe the rumour; I’d long since been exposed to the surreal reality that lay below the ordered veneer that was the matrix. It was easy to believe such legends could exist when I’d traversed the resonance realms like Alice lost in Wonderland.
You couldn’t see Boston’s scars in meatspace and I hadn’t yet immersed myself into the city’s grid to check. As we left the I95 and drove through a district called Lexington, past the strip malls and consumer product distribution warehouses that clustered like feeder animals around the junction, it seemed like any other city in the UCAS. It was only as we travelled further in that I started to see the signs that we were somewhere wealthy.
There were fewer junctions on the road, for one, just feeder roads leading to one private corporate neighbourhood after another. There were no homes overlooking the road, either. Instead, we were hidden from view behind tall fences, artful shrubbery and real evergreen trees – each of which had their own grid-linked monitoring and nutrient system to keep them alive in the face of the occasional atmospheric offensive drifting over from the rest of the metroplex.
As with all things, however, there was a balance in Lexington’s wealth. The rich wanted to separate themselves from the world, but not completely; some concessions were necessary. Somebody had to staff the shops, tend the lawns and provide the boots on the ground that were the foundation of their prized security.
The gated communities could either improve the transport links to the rest of the city – which would allow the rest of the city to come to them – or they could swallow some iota of their pride and parcel off a patch of land for the sake of necessity. They’d chosen the latter.
In this case, that meant a wide, unmarked road that wound its way down into a natural depression in the land that had been excavated further until it could fit a tight cluster of four long buildings, each five storeys tall with only the top three storeys visible above the ground level. Even those were concealed by a carefully-transplanted wall of tall trees. It was a town in microcosm, with three of the buildings dedicated to apartments and the last reserved for all the essentials a town might need – a school, a clinic, a miniature Minuteman Security precinct, a whole floor of shops and a few essential services occupying the topmost floor.
You could actually buy your own online, if you had the kind of cred corps or municipal governments could throw around. The whole thing was a Saeder-Krupp product; a low-footprint housing estate for low income workers that included ongoing services and support for a reasonable maintenance fee. The exact same four buildings could be found across the world; on corporate job sites, repeated a dozen times over on the edge of sprawls, or – like here – nestled in some out of the way place in a more prosperous district.
Bitch dropped me off in front of the commercial building, pulling up behind a minibus full of gardeners returning from their shift. Keeping the homes of the wealthy running required odd jobs at odd hours, from the gardeners maintaining each municipal lawn to the twenty-four seven security that kept the communities gated. It meant the estate didn’t really have on or off hours; around me I could see people who were coming, going or enjoying some small leisure time.
The inside of the commercial building was a fairly typical low-ceilinged strip mall, with decently-lit white corridors passing glass-fronted stores that all leant towards the lower end of the market; advertising cheap prices for cheaper clothes, overprocessed groceries and plastic furniture. Each store had a sign next to the entrance depicting which currency they accepted, with UCAS dollars and Nuyen next to a small number of different varieties of scrip paid by megacorps to their employees to ensure they spent their wages within the corp and its affiliates.
At the end of the row of shops – no doubt a deliberate choice by the Saeder-Krupp architects to maximise commercial foot traffic – was a cluster of elevators that I rode up to the fifth floor. It still looked like a mall, but the corridor was a little narrower; this floor was for people who were looking for specific service buildings, rather than impulse buying. I passed a dentist and a clinic before finally finding what I was looking for; a Comfy Cubicle franchise.
Our target was a gated Renraku neighbourhood constructed around a large data centre. It was built in Boston before Crash 2.0 to take advantage of the city’s position as a wired matrix hub, and the close proximity to the East Coast Stock Exchange before it moved back to Wall Street. Distance wasn’t everything in hacking, but it did make a difference and the Renraku compound was less than a kilometre away. The real issue, though, was that I couldn’t lie down in the back of Bitch’s van, which made a deep dive into the Matrix an uncomfortable prospect.
There were no employees on site. Or, at least, none of them were visible. Instead, I was met by a simple touchscreen next to a sliding door with a mesh-reinforced window. The menu had large font, larger buttons and was generally idiot proof – it wasn’t like there were many options to choose from. Being forced to pay extra for the larger version of the product was a gripe I was long familiar with, but it was hard to argue with the necessity here. Coffin hotels weren’t famous for being spacious, after all.
With the payment made and a check-out time set for six AM – the earliest the system would allow – the reinforced door slid open to reveal a long corridor of one-metre square doors stacked three high, with rungs built into the doors themselves so that people could reach the top shelf. Most of the coffins were unoccupied at this time of day, but a handful had red lights on their doors rather than green, and one bottom-shelf coffin was open, with a human woman in worn clothes taking one look at me before hurriedly throwing a cheap backpack into the coffin and climbing in after it. I tried not to hold it against her.
Beyond the normal-sized coffins was a small area containing a handful of communal shower cubicles and toilets, as well as a single vending machine next to a narrow floor to ceiling window that looked out onto the rest of the estate. After that came the troll-sized coffins; one point five metres square and arranged side-on so that they could be three metres long, rather than two.
I clambered up into my second-row coffin, ducking my head to fit my horns under the top as I shuffled back and pulled the door shut behind me. Inside, the coffin was a white space with a thin foam mattress for a floor, covered in a wipe-clean plastic surface. There were two narrow shelves built into the wall near the entrance, and a small console of electronics set at the far end that could be manipulated to turn on the air conditioning, alarm clock, integrated commlink or the trideo set that could be swung up to the ceiling for a more comfortable viewing experience. Of course, none of it would work without an additional payment.
It wasn’t exactly the most comfortable bed in the world, but it was more comfortable than huddling up on the floor of a moving van. I crawled down the length of the coffin until I could lie flat on my back, then flicked off the lights with a stray thought before opening my mind to the matrix.
The scope of it was overwhelming. Boston had been a centre of technological advancement even back in the Fifth World; in the present day it was still a central hub for any number of telecommunications and matrix service providers, megacorporate research sites, classified academic databases and the almost overwhelming presence of NeoNet, the globe-spanning megacorporation that called Boston home. For the first time, I found myself almost overwhelmed by the sight of the myriad datastreams passing through the ether – that any man-made interface device filtered out as a matter of course.
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The matrix had always appeared to me as a black void in which metahumanity’s presence hung like a constellation of multifaceted stars. Icons, datastreams and personas thronged around the blocky, geometric shapes of hosts, while larger, more private hosts hovered overhead like immense islands in the sky. In and among those islands, perpetually visible no matter where I looked, were the icons of the various grids.
The public grid was free and accessible to all in a supposed act of philanthropy by the Matrix’s creators, but it was slow and easily breached, which meant that for the average user it was an easy way to have your persona harassed, bombarded with spam and robbed. Far above them, looming on the horizon, were the symbols of private pay-to-access grids managed by different matrix service providers. Hub Grid was Boston’s own, while UCAS Online served the country as a whole, but they were local grids that only offered good service within their geographical bounds. To support worldwide coverage you needed more resources than a nation had on hand.
The symbol of Renraku Okoku was a red pagoda visible in the far distance, until I focused my attention on it and opened myself up to its attention. Neither of us moved, but I was suddenly dwarfed beneath the immense side of the pagoda, as Renraku’s friendly user interface menu appeared before my persona. I’d debated the merits of hacking in before deciding it simply wasn’t worth it; I’d already had to make some subtle tweaks to my presence in the matrix in order to present myself as a Xiao Technologies XT-2G commlink associated with a SIN I’d cloned from a Boston resident. Adding on fake Renraku permissions would only weaken that façade, so instead I transferred the funds to get me legitimate access to Renraku’s grid.
The doors of the pagoda opened, bathing me in a red glow, as the matrix around me shifted from the freeing utilitarianism of the public grid to something altogether more controlled, flooded with bandwidth but sculpted and constrained to suit the will of its makers.
It wasn’t as Japanese as I was expecting. Instead, Boston’s matrix was represented as a distinctly New England pastoral idyll, with rolling hills broken up by colonial-era dwellings and red barns that would impress the Amish if it weren’t for the many obvious reasons they’d never see it.
“I’m on the grid,” I spoke through the link to the rest of the team. “It’s surprisingly homely in here.”
Tattletale’s voice came back loud and clear, transmitted by a vibration microphone built into her earring. “Renraku’s as conservative as any other Japancorp, but they adapt their conservatism to match their environment. The c-suite is as Japanese as it gets, but at the regional level they’ll at least pay lip service to Americana.”
“It’s not an America I’ve ever seen,” I mused, with another glance at the environment. “What’s your status?”
“Split up, as we discussed. I’m in a cab and about three minutes out.”
“Is it safe for you to talk?” If there was a driver in front of her, it might be worth keeping up the façade just in case.
Tattletale laughed. “The cab’s driverless, omae; nobody here but us shadowrunners. One of these days I’m going to use my hard-won blood money to show you how the other half lives.”
“I’m about to get a front row view,” I countered, as I managed to track down Lisa’s commlink in the matrix. “I have eyes on you now.”
Lisa was wearing delicate AR-linked contact lenses that were paired with her commlink. Put together, they allowed her to look into the publicly-visible augmented reality objects of the matrix, running on a travel plan with the Eternal Horizon grid to best fit into the fake identity she’d constructed. Like all the best fakes, she’d told me, it was basically the truth.
As the taxi pulled to a stop, Lisa stepped out into a large parking lot half full of high-end motors from a dozen different manufacturers. She turned, and the mall swung into view.
It wasn’t just a mall, of course. The immense structure of steel and glass occupied one side of a gated Renraku community of idyllic suburban homes, luxury condo buildings and a few functional yet still aesthetically appealing tenement blocks tucked away in one corner. The mall occupied the lowest floors of the structure, with one forecourt opening up into the Renraku compound and the other facing out towards the car park and Boston beyond it, luring in people from across the city in much the same way an angler fish lured in prey with a pretty light.
Above that mall, rising up fifteen stories, was the Renraku data centre. It wasn’t the only workplace in the compound but it was by far the largest and – according to Renraku’s own press releases – employed the largest percentage of the compound’s residents. Unlike the glass-fronted megamall that occupied the lowest floors, the tower above was almost all white-painted concrete, save for a horizontal strip of balconies at the halfway point and the occasional long strip of narrow windows or the glass-fronted elevator shafts that ran vertically up the sides of the building.
Tattletale strode towards the mall with an absolute and effortless confidence, as if the looming demonstration of megacorporate power meant nothing to her. The mall – and, by extension, Renraku’s extraterritorial enclave – was separated from both Boston and the UCAS by a checkpoint manned by security guards who were dressed like no private security I’d ever seen.
It was almost like they’d chosen to show up to work in their dress uniforms; perfectly-ironed suit jackets with polished metal buttons worn over a white button-up shirt and an actual tie, of all things. The jackets were Renraku’s trademarked shade of red, while the pants, tie and their peaked caps were a shade of blue so deep it was almost black. Crowning the whole ensemble were their spotless white gloves.
Before subjecting Tattletale to a SIN check and an x-ray scan, the officer assigned to her actually bowed, Japanese style, and apologised for the inconvenience. She remained courteous even while Tattletale completely blanked her, a flick of her fingers opening up a Tír Tairngire gossip magazine in AR.
I’d always known that wealth opened doors, but it was one thing to understand it on an intellectual level and another thing entirely to see it in action. I knew from mom that Renraku were as racist as most of the other Japancorps, but Tattletale’s metatype was clearly secondary to the careful air of wealth she’d cultivated around her. Of course, I very much doubt security would be so cordial if they figured out why we were there.
In the matrix, I followed Tattletale into the mall’s host, which resembled a historic Boston department store from the outside. It was a little incongruous sitting in the middle of the colonial-era frontier village that represented the surrounding hosts, but who was I to criticise a megacorp’s visual design team?
Unlike Tattletale, my access was completely unobstructed; I was already on Renraku’s grid, but even then the matrix wasn’t bound by national laws in the same way as meatspace. If someone from Boston wanted to order something from the mall and have it delivered, Renraku weren’t going to quibble about access when there was money to be made and no risk they could see.
Tattletale strode casually past the lower end stores on the ground floor of the mall, meant to draw in impulse buyers and provide essential goods to the residents of the compound. She didn’t bite, riding the escalators to the top floor where the luxury brands dwelled. There was a wide variety of designer products and businesses selling them, though I knew each of them was a wholly-owned Renraku subsidiary no matter what the sign over the door said.
The matrix version of the mall was far more compact, but only if you wanted it to be. Users could browse through a catalogue of each store’s inventory or they could expand the store into a perfect mirror of its realspace counterpart and wander the shelves as if they were there in person, making purchases that would then be delivered to their address. Like the pastoral overlay on Renraku’s grid, it seemed like a pointless waste of processing power to me – a needless surrender to physical reality – but I’d begun to accept that I didn’t actually understand much about what normal people wanted from cyberspace.
Tattletale browsed her way from store to store with the languid ease of someone utterly at home in their surroundings, even making a few purchases with a discretionary budget we’d negotiated from Calvert to help sell her cover. The other customers were mostly human and most of them were noticeably older than Tattletale, but she still fit right in.
Once enough time had passed for her to sell her cover, she finally made her way to a store whose window displays advertised the latest version of Renraku’s ‘Sensei’ model of high-end commlinks.
The moment she entered the store, I saw a pair of eyes land on her. A period of exactly ten seconds passed – long enough for Tattletale to take in the store – before she was intercepted by a sales clerk in a black pencil skirt and closed-necked white suit jacket that reminded me somewhat of a pharmacist. It was undeniably a uniform, rather than a suit, and had a small Renraku logo – a red circle containing the company’s name in white English letters as a concession to the local market – printed on the breast.
The ginger-haired human woman was all smiles and congeniality as she gave Tattletale a greeting that had clearly been rehearsed enough to no longer sound rehearsed. She didn’t bow – probably another concession to American sensibilities – but her stance practically oozed corporate servility, with her hands clasped in front of her and a placid expression on her face.
“Greetings, ma’am. Is there any way I can assist you today?”
“You certainly can!” Tattletale exclaimed, cheerfully. We hadn’t actually acquired a fake SIN for her, but we also didn’t want anyone to trace our activities back to Lisa Wilbourne. So I’d re-registered Lisa’s commlink under her old name - Saraye Liaran – and linked it to her very real Tír Tairngire SIN. The Tír was secretive enough that it didn’t share any SIN data beyond the fact that the individual bearing it was a citizen, but I was standing by ready to tweak any data in case Renraku were somehow able to tell if she’d been added to a missing persons registry or listed as dead.
To match her cover, Tattletale had rolled her accent back to its original state; adopting the almost sonorous tones of someone who’d grown up speaking the elven language of sperathiel. To my distinctly non-elven ears, she sounded like a valley girl who couldn’t decide if that valley was in California or Wales.
“I’ve been thinking about changing my matrix service provider, and figured I might as well do it while I’m here,” she continued, placing a hand on the attendant’s back in a way that might have been seen as friendly and gracious if you were an ultra-privileged girl with no concept of boundaries. She practically led the woman over to the couches that occupied one side of the store, who bore the indignity with the placid stoicism of someone who was paid to tolerate the whims of the wealthy in order to part them from a fraction of their wealth.
“I am at your service,” the attendant spoke, sitting primly with her legs together and back straight as Tattletale sank languidly into the opposite couch. “We offer a variety of competitive plans to suit our client’s needs. If I may ask, ma’am, what plan do you have at present?”
“Horizon’s secure package, I don’t know the details,” Tattletale said with a dismissive wave. “It’s perfect for home because Horizon are in bed with Prince Zincan, but daddy’s finally decided to let me see the world before I go old and grey so I want something with a more worldwide presence.”
“Horizon are a strong domestic company,” the attendant – who hadn’t given her name, and whose name Tattletale hadn’t asked for – “but Renraku is a much older corporation with a far more global reach. We also have a substantial presence in Tír Tairngire through the tourism industry, which means you will notice no drop in service even when you return from your grand tour.”
She hadn’t outright insulted Horizon – just in case Tattletale held any brand loyalty to them – but she hadn’t been honest, either. Both Horizon and Renraku were in the big ten; the largest companies in the world. Renraku might have had a larger proportion of its business dedicated to matrix services, but both maintained global grids that were largely comparable in signal strength.
“Great! It has to be really secure, though; daddy’s orders.” She gave a long, exasperated sigh that still somehow managed to come across as carefree.
“Renraku’s ethos rests on three pillars; confidentiality, security and discretion. I can assure you, your data is safe with us.”
As they kept talking, I turned my attention to the shop’s online presence. As I’d hoped, I could see a clear chain of nodes leading from the store’s systems to somewhere in the vast host of the data centre that hung above my persona and Tattletale’s head. It didn’t really matter what the connections were – whether they were for market research or they simply took advantage of the store’s proximity to run trials on software that would be used franchise-wide. What mattered was that they were there, and that I could exploit them.
Tattletale had reached the crux of her conversation-slash-negotiation with the attendant, who’d been sending out signals through her company-given cybernetics, appealing for approval from someone above her and receiving assent from two sources a moment later. Probably someone in sales to authorise the offer and someone in security to verify the demo would be secure. Either way, Tattletale’s AR contact lenses lit up with a request for a connection.
The moment she authorised it, a datastream appeared in my vision linking her and the store’s server, which was in turn connected to a test version of Renraku’s comm software. It wasn’t the software we wanted – the ‘Myo’ package that the Anders family used was well beyond the means of any cover identity we could put together on short notice – but it was indirectly connected to the data host above. That would have to do.
As the attendant talked Tattletale through the various bells and whistles of the operating system, from simplified technical specifications to the perks that came with the plan, I slipped into Tattletale’s comm using the pathways I’d built into it. As I’d expected, her system was currently experiencing the full weight of Renraku’s scrutiny, as embodied by a dedicated Intrusion Countermeasure that was watching her every move for any hint of illegal activity.
As I attempted to weave my way into the IC’s perceptions, I began to understand why Calvert had taken the time to warn me about Renraku’s software advantage. The underlying coding that had gone into the program was fiendishly complex for piece of frontline monitoring software. I had to smother three separate alarms before they could be triggered, as the IC reflexively twinged at even the slightest intrusion on my part.
Eventually, however, its complex yet primitive mind finally concluded that I was just a sensor ghost, and it returned to Tattletale’s actions as she began flicking her way through the homepage of Renraku’s app store, feigning interest in what was on offer.
I turned my attention to the datastream. It crossed the barrier between Tattletale’s commlink and a diagnostic terminal inside the data host. Judging by the data that was passing between the two devices, it was collecting data on Tattletale’s commlink in order to adapt the operating system to best run on her specific device.
I began teasing messages on my own into the real-time log of Tattletale’s CPU, trusting that the minute particles of resonance would go undetected even as they accumulated like dust on the other side of the host. It was like wearing away a mountain with drops of water, but it worked. The resonance gathered together on the other side of the host, latching onto the base code of the diagnostic terminal until it took shape as a simple line of script embedded into the system that was broadcasting instructions to Tattletale’s comm.
The next transmission it sent was directed at me and contained a duplicate copy of the access permissions that allowed the terminal to send and receive data from outside the host. It was the key I needed; with a thought, I followed the datastream out of the mall and through the barrier of the Renraku data centre.
As I emerged into a black void populated by crisp angular geometric shapes and waterfall-like walls of red code, sculpted by overimaginative technicians to resemble nothing more than the trideo ideal of what the matrix should look like, I took a moment to let out a mental sigh of relief before sending out another transmission, wrapping the datastream in a concealing strand of resonance.
Beyond the confines of the host, I felt Imp’s presence as she turned her commlink back to full functionality. I’d had her running almost silent, with only enough bandwidth to receive plaintext messages, and further shrouded her in a veil of resonance. Now I had full access to both her comm and the feed that Bitch had implanted into her suit, transmitting the feed from her optics to me.
Imp was looking out at Boston from the eleventh floor of the tower – the eighth floor of the data centre. This far from the heart of the city, I couldn’t make out any details beyond the great angular silhouettes of megabuildings, arcologies and sharp skyscrapers, rising up like an artificial hill that peaked in the financial heart of the city. As Imp looked down at the vertigo-inducing drop to the parking lot, I saw her invisible body outlined in AR by vivid red lines. She was seated on the tempered glass railing of the balcony, her legs dangling out over empty space as she idly kicked her feet.
Without saying a word, she pushed against the balcony with her hands and – slowly, so as not to disrupt her stealth – lifted and twisted her whole body upwards until she held herself in a perfect handstand, looking upside down at the reinforced doors that led out onto the balcony. With an almost preternatural grace, she shifted her weight and lowered first one foot then the other onto the balcony, giving Boston an invisible bow before pivoting on her toes and striding towards the data centre as the character of her movement changed from a dancer’s grace to the deadly elegance of a predator.
As I lifted the veil around her just enough to flash my mark on her comm, the balcony doors slid soundlessly open in recognition. She was in.
That was stage one, I thought. Now for the delicate part.