We knew the front door was never going to work. It wasn’t the online security, necessarily, but all the details around the online security. The entrance to the datacentre was in the same building as the mall, which meant the fundamental character of the space abruptly changed from one that encouraged visitors to one that had orders to detain them. That necessitated a liminal space between the two worlds that was packed with every security measure Renraku could afford.
As one of the world’s largest corporations, that meant a wide atrium between mall and datacentre that functioned as a killing floor; a lobby that had been sculpted to appeal to the people who used it every day, but that was devoid of cover and had firing points built into the very architecture. It meant mantraps designed to ensure employees could only enter one at a time, with a weight sensor in the floor to verify that there really was only one of them. It meant iris recognition scanners, System Identification Number checks, magnetic anomaly detectors and a wagemage with a bound spirit monitoring the astral plane for anything out of the ordinary.
Imp had evaded at least some of those before, or so she claimed, but never all at once. She’d been animated back in the loft when we went through the plan; boasting with unrepressed glee about how she’d raided luxury high-rises, jewellery stores, boutique fashion outlets and private art collections. Even when I pointed out that she’d never tangled with a megacorp it wasn’t enough to dampen her sails. She simply smirked, pointed to the building plans and said that it didn’t matter how secure the front door was when she could just open another.
She’d timed her entrance well; a short human in a business blouse was stepping out onto the balcony with a disposable cup of soykaf in one hand and a cigarette in the other. In the matrix, the automated door registered two authorised SINs and slid open. If one of them didn’t have permission to access the building’s secure host – and, by extension, the building itself – the door would have locked itself, dropped the inner shutters over the windows and the outer shutters over the balcony, and deployed the two automated turrets nestled in the ceiling to complete the kill-box.
The trick to burglary, Imp had remarked, is that no matter how secure somewhere is, people still have to live there. The balcony ran along the mid-point of the tower, equidistant between the highest and lowest offices. If you were a Renraku architect designing your new building with a head full of buzzwords like “human factors” and “time in motion” then it would make sense to place the communal areas where they could be accessed by everyone in the shortest amount of time.
That included the balcony. No doubt some extensive research had generated the grudging conclusion that metahumans functioned better with the occasional exposure to fresh air and natural light, so the balcony was installed as a way of providing that without anyone actually leaving their workplace. The door to the balcony worked on the principal that those accessing it had already passed through the security measures on the ground floor, which made it an oversight we could exploit.
It was all guesswork, of course – we didn’t have the time or the access needed for real reconnaissance – but it had paid off. Looking through Imp’s camera feed, I saw a spotless and almost empty cafeteria, with long white tables in the centre of the space and smaller booths hugging the walls. A smattering of office workers occupied some of the booths, nursing cups of soykaf, but it was clearly long past the lunch rush and the long counters of food were empty and unlit save for a few prepackaged goods next to the till.
“It’s like they designed it to suck your soul out,” Imp remarked, taking in the crisp and minimalist corporate décor.
“It’s a cafeteria, not a dining room,” I countered. “Time spent in here is time not spent working.”
Imp let out a sharp breath, her hand unconsciously drifting towards a plastic-wrapped mochi ball before she thought better of it. “No way to live.”
“There are a lot of people who would disagree,” I mused, “but you’re with the right sort now.”
“I was before,” she snapped back, “but I bet Alec could do something really nice with all these white walls.”
“Regent when we’re on the job, even over comms,” I said in rebuke. “But seriously? Think he’d have the patience to paint all that?”
“Fraggin’ obviously,” Imp shot back. “I can’t paint for drek, but I know what’s wiz. Regent could’ve had all the cred and slots he wanted back in the Troupe.”
There was something in the way she’d said it that made me pause. I’d noted Regent’s artwork on the doors and the walls of the loft when I first joined the team, but it had long since faded into the background of my mind. As I thought about it in more detail, however, I found I had trouble reconciling the art with Regent’s lethargic attitude.
For him to put in that much effort – not just into creating art, but becoming better at the craft – it must be a real passion of his.
I cleared my thoughts, mentally shaking my head. I needed to get back to the here and now.
“Hold tight for a second, I’m going to snoop around the matrix.”
Unlike a lot of the other hosts I’d visited, the datacentre’s matrix mirror bore no resemblance whatsoever to the meatspace tower. It wasn’t just in the visual layer, but in the layout of the host itself. Most of the hosts I’d visited that had been tied to a specific physical location had been meant to invite in visitors from outside. Typically, that meant the host mirrored the structure of the building, with each icon and device positioned exactly where it sat in meatspace.
The datacentre was a workplace, however, which meant its users were expected to be familiar with a different layout designed around encouraging efficiency, which meant something different in the matrix. To further add to the confusion, this host was meant to be accessed by IT professionals, which meant it had very little of the handholding you’d expect for a workforce who might otherwise be creeped out by pure VR.
There was no gravity, no sense of up and down, not even any real light in the traditional sense. Put a matrix novice like Tattletale in the host and she’d come out puking her guts up with vertigo, but for corporate codeslaves it meant they could move their persona from one device to another instantaneously, dealing with the pure essence of a thing rather than being limited by a metahuman-friendly shell.
I felt right at home as I navigated from one node to another, staying clear of blaring red firewalls for now as I examined what my limited access allowed me. Every now and then a piece of patrol IC – rendered as a hollow shell of red light that vaguely resembled a stylised eye – would scan me, but I had permission to be in the host and I hadn’t yet broken any of its rules. That was enough for their simple programming.
The nature of the host meant that there wouldn’t be anything so obvious as a map on the wall, but that was nothing a little unorthodox thinking couldn’t fix. I found what I was looking for in the facilities subsystem, nestled in and amongst the governing OS of the elevators. As I’d hoped, the display did more than just show off the floor number; it also displayed the departments present on each. No doubt some designer somewhere had decided that would make for a user-friendly touch.
Well, I’m a user, I thought to myself, and I find it very friendly indeed.
“Thirteenth floor,” I said to Imp. “Head for the elevators and hang around until one opens.”
“What about the stairs?” she asked.
“Alarmed,” I guessed. “Nobody uses the stairs in a place like this.”
Imp snorted. “’Course they don’t. Bunch of chair-jockeys and wireheads.”
“Well aren’t you lucky I don’t need wires?” I countered. “Get moving, meathead.”
“Swing and a miss, girl. Try and come up with something better for next time.”
“Like ‘wirehead’ is high art?” I snapped. “It’s a middle school insult.”
“Which is weird, right? ‘Cos I didn’t go to middle school.”
Abruptly, Tattletale’s whispered voice came through on the shared channel.
“Girls, girls, you’re both pretty, but let’s keep our mind on the job, okay? There’s no need to test just how soundproof that fancy suit is.”
“Right, yeah,” I said, losing myself in the matrix for a moment as I tried to centre myself. If I’m going to step up, I need to stop being drawn into petty shit like that. Imp isn’t going to change, so just grit your teeth and deal.
When I looked back at Imp’s feed, I found her slowly pacing from side to side outside a bank of elevators. They weren’t the glass-fronted ones I’d spotted hugging the walls of the building; those were reserved for executives and poking them would draw too much attention in the matrix. Instead, she was at the very core of the structure waiting for someone to come along and push the button for her.
“So is this what it’s normally like?” Imp asked after a minute or two. “I mean, not exactly. I don’t see any of you climbing up the side of a building.”
“Honestly, I don’t think I could pin down any of the jobs I’ve done and call it ‘normal,’” I answered. “Each one’s been different and, so far, a lot larger than the one before.”
“It means we’re moving up in the world,” Tattletale chimed in. “We’re constantly pushing at our limits and discovering they’re further away than we thought.”
“Can’t climb forever,” Imp countered, with a little of the emotion I’d noticed in my apartment. “At some point, you’ll reach the roof. Then there’s only one way down.”
“Which is why it’s important to be careful,” I said, thinking I could turn her melancholy into a lesson. “To see problems coming before we have to face them.”
“That’s not how it-” Imp began, before she cut herself off as a pair of wageslaves entered the room and moved over to one of the elevators, one of them waving a hand over the sensor built into the display. They were both women – a heavy-set human and a surprisingly tall and thin dwarf – and both were dressed in corporate attire that was as professional as it was severe, with tight skirts in dark colours and light blouses in different shades of red. Their commlinks were broadcasting their Renraku SINs to the building’s host, identifying them as Lila Wong and Leticia Boone and linking them to the marketing department.
As the elevator doors slid open, Imp sidled in after the two women while they continued their conversation, completely oblivious to their small gang of eavesdroppers.
“I just don’t see the point,” the dwarf – Leticia – was complaining. “I get having it there, but why do we have to submit one every month? Isn’t it supposed to be an emergency thing?”
“I bet it’s not actually mandatory,” Lila mused, “it just helps Reynolds’ metrics to have each employee putting in one ‘active security’ form a month.”
“How does that make sense? Surely having that many risks reported would make his superiors think he’s incompetent?”
The human turned and leant against the wall, looking down at her colleague as she explained, while Imp slowly waved an invisible hand in front of her face.
“Think about it. Corporate made those forms because they want them to be used; it’s not about the actual issues raised, it’s about Reynolds showing that he’s receiving and actioning those forms. That way the c-suite knows he’s being proactive about security, not just resting on his laurels.”
“I guess that makes sense. It’s just a pain to come up with a new one each month.”
“I’ll let you in on a trick.” The human leant in, faux-conspiratorially. “Pick an issue they can’t fix and just put that one in each month. We have to pass through the mall on our way out, so I just say that there’s a risk due to non-citizens sharing a space with our research staff. They can’t change the whole building to fix it, so I can just copy in the same paragraph each month.”
“That works?” the dwarf asked, though she trailed off as the elevator doors slid open again.
The sight that greeted us chilled me to the bone. Even Imp was rattled, taking a half-step back and muttering “Holy shit.”
The corporate samurai – there was no way he could be anything else – was dressed in a set of black ballistic armour that had been styled to resemble his historic counterpart, down to the sculpted snarling face on the ballistic mask attached to his helmet. He was carrying a rifle – a short-barrelled weapon with the magazine located behind the trigger – and he wore the katana and wakizashi that signified his rank in sheathes on his webbing belt.
He could have walked straight off the set of any number of trideo shows, films or games. He was a cultural icon made manifest; the embodiment of Renraku’s Bushido ethos, repackaging Japanese imperialism for the corporate age. He was an image they promoted to the world through every means at their disposal; the reason Grue was called a ‘street samurai,’ rather than a cowboy or a soldier. Even I’d watched a few episodes of Sentai Samurai when I was a kid, before mom put a stop to it.
This particular action hero had a rank tab on either side of the collar of his armour – a metal star between two red lines – and his own SIN identified him as First Lieutenant Miguel Gutierrez, though his name was almost buried beneath the identifier for his social class.
“Good afternoon, sir,” Lila said, clasping her hands in front of her and giving the samurai a short bow. Her colleague followed suit almost immediately. I’d heard rumours that Renraku’s samurai had the authority and even the obligation to kill anyone who disrespected them or the corporation and, in that moment, I fully believed it. There was something in the way he carried himself – proud and upright even in full armour – that seemed to radiate uncompromising, ruthless loyalty.
He paid the two marketers no mind, turning his back on them before thumbing the button for two floors up. Imp stood uncharacteristically still and silent, her head shifting as she looked the samurai up and down.
“Fucking nova.” She almost breathed the word, her fear gone and her whispered tone carrying something close to awe. “Now this is what I was expecting when you said we were running against Renraku.”
“Quiet down,” Tattletale whispered back. “He’ll have chrome. Maybe enhanced hearing.”
When the samurai left the elevator two floors later the two wageslaves seemed to relax, letting out an almost imperceptible sigh of relief. They didn’t say another word as the elevator continued its journey up to the thirteenth floor, where I reached out and brought it to a stop.
The two women looked at each other with faintly puzzled expressions as the doors slid open and Imp sidled out into the corridor, but they didn’t comment on it. No doubt they’d blame it on some system glitch accidentally summoning two elevators to the same floor.
Judging by the information I’d been able to gleam from the elevator, the thirteenth floor was the topmost of five levels dedicated to managing the datacentre’s network infrastructure, supporting Renraku’s grid in this part of the world and maintaining the networks of telecommunications systems that were meant for both Renraku’s many clients and to support the megacorporation’s own world-wide systems.
As I moved my persona towards the fortress-like node of data that was associated with the devices around Imp, I saw that the physical workplaces were organised hierarchically. The thirteenth floor was the closest to the executives on the fifteenth floor, so it dealt with the most secure and lucrative systems.
The details of what those systems might have been was frustratingly obscured from me behind another layer of security. I’d gained access to the host, but it was the sort of access that all its employees would have had, albeit with a few more permissions than most. Peering closer at the glaring red firewalls in front of me, I saw that the cube-like node was actually an entrance to an entirely separate host within a host.
It was processing a staggering amount of data, visible as strands of light linking it to other devices within the wider building before leaving for a myriad of destinations unseen. I knew that if I teased apart the encryption on one of those transmissions I’d find an impenetrably dense mass of code; compacted communications information from hundreds of thousands of different devices transmitted in a single inviolate beam.
I could also see the layers of security as they shifted around the constant streams of data. It was a morass of hidden pitfalls and sharp code, all of it bristling with sensors ready to log any intrusion and flood the host with countermeasures in response. I was afraid to even go near it, never mind try and break through, but that was what Imp was for.
She’d begun to creep her way through the corridors of the software hub, passing the occasional employee. Some were dressed in typically severe business attire but most wore tight-fitting cooler suits designed to keep their body temperature low while their internal cyberdecks burned with the amount of data they were processing. Their datajacks were far more invasive than I was used to; many of them had replaced their entire cranium with cyberware, the backs of their heads exposed to reveal a port linked directly to their brain to remove even the miniscule latency that came from a wireless connection.
They plugged those datajacks into recliners that were visible through the glass walls on either side of the corridor, then plugged the suits into feeds that injected coolant and nutrients, along with others that removed waste to allow them to work in the matrix uninterrupted for the entire length of their shift. The décor of the floor was all dark colours and dull lighting that only emphasised the blinking red lights on the esoteric machinery.
The people were more than gloomy enough to match their environment; their flesh was pallid, their eyes sunken, their bodies almost universally gaunt under the effects of a mostly drip-fed diet. They lived almost their entire lives in the matrix. Many of them must have been diving since they were in elementary school, when they were first tested for aptitude before being raised by Renraku for this specific purpose.
If I hadn’t inherited my mother’s stony complexion, I’d probably look a lot like them by now.
“That’s no way to live,” Imp remarked as she stepped out of the way of a passing programmer.
“You’re only seeing meatspace,” I countered. “But I get your point.”
Besides the recliners and banks of blinking servers, the purpose of each room was utterly indeterminable. All the relevant augmented reality icons were powered by the host I couldn’t access.
“Find someone on their own,” I said. “Somewhere with low foot traffic. We don’t want anyone walking in.”
“Whatever you say.”
“Tattletale, are we still good?”
“The mall’s the same as ever,” Tattletale answered. “I’ve bought another cute top, but they didn’t have anything in your size.”
“Figures,” I said, with a metaphorical shrug of my shoulders. “So we’re clear?”
“No corporate goons storming through just yet. I’ve called the taxi back. I’ll rendezvous with Bitch and lurk nearby in case things go south.”
“We’re parked up in a gas station,” the cyborg herself interjected. “Ready to move.”
“Stay put for now, Bitch” I said. “Security here is heavier than you can handle and Tattletale will come to you. We play this quiet for as long as we can.”
“Understood,” came her terse reply.
“Hey, Regent,” Imp interjected, “I hope your ass ain’t getting sore from sitting around while I do all the real work.”
“I’m too pretty to go crawling through air ducts,” Regent countered in a languid tone. “Besides, I don’t have to; we’ve hired a new minion for that.”
This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road. If you spot it on Amazon, please report it.
“Keep the channel clear,” I snapped. “I don’t need you two bickering inside my head.”
“As you command, my unrelenting overlord.”
Imp snickered as I put Regent on mute.
Blissful silence followed as I returned my attention to the matrix. I was starting to pick out individual strands of data from the encrypted masses. Enough to catch the substance of a transmission, rather than the content. What I saw was the signature of dozens of databases that no doubt belonged to different corporate or government entities who paid Renraku to manage their most secure networks. The potential paydata here would be worth a small fortune to the right buyers, but I knew that dipping my fingers in the pot would risk the discovery of the tap I was supposed to install.
Still, it was tempting.
“How’s this?” Imp’s voice came through the channel, drawing my attention away from the matrix once again.
She was somewhere off the main rows of virtual offices, peering through a narrow glass window mounted in the door of an otherwise windowless room. Inside, the space was as spartan as any other office on this floor but the decker inside was old, with a shaggy grey beard and long hair that was definitely not within Renraku’s uniform regulations. His cooler suit also looked custom made, though it was still in corporate black and red.
“Good pick,” Tattletale chimed in. “I’m guessing this guy’s way off in his own corner somewhere?”
“He looks like long-term technical staff,” I said in agreement. “Some old-timer who knows how all the pre-crash spaghetti code works, so they coddle him with higher pay and his own office far away from the colleagues he hates.”
“Makes it risky for you, right?” Imp asked. “I mean, it’s like a kid in a judo class going up against a master adept.”
“Hacking isn’t martial arts,” I countered, with a little indignant pride. “All the old timers know is old stuff. Good for grunt work in the corporate trenches, but when you’re slinging code against code it’s evolve or die. He’ll do.”
Imp reached out and opened the door, closing it soundlessly behind her before sidling across the room to the programmer’s recliner. As I’d expected, the back of his head was a mess of cables interwoven with strands of hair, plugged into what looked like an entirely custom hot-sim rig that seemed to be about twenty years old, though it had undergone some modern upgrades here and there.
There was even an old-school cyberdeck incorporated onto the side of the system – essentially a large processor the size of a keyboard with actual, physical keys for inputting data, though it seemed nobody had touched them in a while. I had to hope the components inside were newer than the casing, otherwise I despaired for the state of the world’s corporate overlords.
I watched as Imp took a moment to peer back out into the corridor before decloaking, the red AR overlay disappearing as her arms shimmered back into view. She reached down, opened up a pouch on her belt and removed the commlink inside. I’d idiot-proofed it by plugging in the datajack before I gave it to her, but Imp still hesitated as she looked over the programmer’s cyberware.
“Hey, tech support, this guy has like fourteen slots on his head and most of them have shit plugged in them. Where am I supposed to jam this doodad?”
It only took me a moment to sort through the forest of different adaptors, like a museum piece charting the changing nature of USB ports over the last thirty years.
“Under his ear. The second one down.”
“Alright, here we go…”
If the programmer was paranoid – or even just smart – he’d have shut down all his open ports before he dove into hot-sim virtual reality, but I was gambling that he wasn’t the former and hoping that he wasn’t the latter either. We were on the thirteenth floor of a megacorporate tower, inside a walled and guarded compound that was sovereign corporate territory. In an environment like that, why bother with paranoia?
Vindication came in the form of a tightly-woven firewall that flared up at my approach. Slightly surprisingly, it was stock Renraku technology of the sort that was available on the public market. Smothering the transmission it tried to send was child’s play, which gave me plenty of time to slowly tease away the layers of encryption. I wondered if the programmer had designed the soft and trusted his own work, or if most of the devices he used had older ports so he never bothered upgrading the security on his most modern connection.
As the firewall gave way, I crept into the programmer’s mind like a thief in the night as the very structure of his consciousness was laid bare before me in an ordered network of processing units and man-machine interfaces. His headware was almost totally intrusive; he’d set up a macro to automatically duplicate his brain’s memories into digital storage, which left part of me wondering if I could exploit a connection like that to edit his organic mind.
I could certainly watch his brain activity through the ebb and flow of the device; neurons passing down nanofibreoptic cables between different pieces of cyberware that were sometimes decades apart in age before flowing out through the tight bundle of wired connections linking him to the cyberdeck built into his recliner, and from there into the host itself.
His mark was a scrawled and stylised crown, almost like a gang sign. Once I’d duplicated it, seizing its permissions for myself, I turned my attention outwards and followed the neural pathways through into the host. Inevitably, that led me to where the programmer – ‘The Duke,’ according to the signature scrawled on his code – was hard at work maintaining an aged and byzantine piece of bloatware simply titled ‘dukesmathworkaround.’ The number of seemingly vital systems that were tied to that cancerous abomination of code was frankly concerning, like walking into a house and seeing fifteen plugs put through an adapter into one socket.
Fortunately, his persona – a sculpted and idealised version of his twenty-year old self whose kimono was open far enough to expose a set of abs that were so chiselled they fell well into the uncanny valley – was utterly engrossed in the modifications he was making to his masterpiece, so he didn’t even notice the sudden duplicate persona that appeared next to him as I stepped out and into the nested host.
On the surface, it was in the same style as the wider building host; a black void occupied by glowing red shapes that represented programs and systems. Immediately, however, I could tell that the systems within were greater in every way than those without. Size doesn’t mean much in the matrix – at least, in a host as close to the bare code as this one – but the icons around me seemed to almost loom with malevolent density.
In and amongst those monuments of coding, smaller icons flitted throughout the space like ants as they made adjustments, corrected errors and smoothed out known issues in the software before the networks’ operators even knew they were there. Maintenance was cheaper than fixing the issue, after all. Shutting down a network for repairs meant losing income.
Some of the icons focused their attention on the personas, not the nodes; patrol IC maintaining a ceaseless vigil even three layers deep into Renraku’s domain. At the sight of them I reached out and drew on the ambient resonance around me, weaving it into a fog that would obfuscate me from all but the most intrusive sensors.
I drifted towards the closest node until it loomed above me, pulsing with the ebb and flow of activity. The surface of it almost resembled a waterfall of glowing red code, bunched together into a single mass of data. I reached out a single finger towards that system, going as slowly as I dared until a single spark passed between the code and the resonance that gave me form.
What I saw sent me flinching back, not physically harmed but shocked to my core. It was an account of alert systems, perimeter warnings, smart minefields and thousands of networked hunter-killer drones all waiting in pregnant anticipation as a whole host of sensors from motion trackers, to RADAR systems, to a trio of orbital satellites filtered incoming data through algorithms that categorised each intruder into two types; threats and non-threats.
It didn’t belong to Renraku’s military. The towns and counties it covered were familiar to me from the occasional news report of one incident or another along the border, but it wasn’t the UCAS’ military either. As I followed the path of the data leaving the node, I knew that if I could somehow see beyond the confines of the host I’d be able to follow that thread all the way to Cheyenne and the headquarters of the Sioux Nation’s military.
The idea that the militaristic Native American Nation would countenance their border security network being hosted within the borders of the very adversary that network was made to watch, even protected by Renraku’s extraterritoriality, was laughable.
Do they even know? I wondered with a start. How would they, if Renraku didn’t tell them?
I left the military network behind. It wasn’t what I was looking for, but it did make me see the data-fortresses around me in a new light. I knew this was where Renraku kept some of their most vital North American digital assets, but it was one thing to know that on an intellectual level and another thing entirely to see what that really meant.
I was so focused on the other nodes around me that I almost didn’t see the Patrol IC languidly drifting through the ether towards me, its sensors feeling out every node, icon and datastream around it. It looked different to the others in the host; its body was an elongated red stream of light with smaller shards jutting out down its length like a fish’s ribcage.
Despite its unusual appearance it behaved exactly as I expected; reaching out and brushing a probe over me as it hunted for any discrepancies. Nothing was truly invisible in the matrix – nothing had a physical form to hide – but through the fog that surrounded me I was able to baffle and confuse the perceptions of programs and people.
What wasn’t expecting was the way the IC didn’t immediately move on upon failing to detect anything it could categorise. Instead, it drifted closer with the languid movements of an eel as it seemed almost to swim in the resonance around me.
A deep and primal dread crept up my spine, as Calvert’s warning rose unbidden in my mind.
Hurriedly, I peered closer at the… entity. Its code was almost semi-transparent, like some deep sea creature unused to the light. I could make out an engineered base structure that resembled a true Patrol-model Intrusion Countermeasure, but it had been warped and twisted to the point of being nearly unrecognisable. Looking at that code, it seemed to me that it had evolved, rather than been made.
Did it happen here? Or did Renraku move it here because it was valuable?
I didn’t have time to speculate. There was no point in avoiding the term; I was face to face with an artificial intelligence. It wasn’t the world-threatening AI I knew from matrix myth and legend, it was more animalistic than that. Protosapient, rather than possessing true intelligence, but a sniffer dog didn’t need sapience to know to find its handler when it encountered something strange.
I peered closer at the AI, trying to find a weakness I could exploit to kill it faster than it could send out an alert. I reached out with the resonance, suffusing its digital organs in an attempt to discern their purpose, and I came across something close to a stomach.
It ran along the ‘spine’ of the entity, the core of which was actually formed from slowly-fragmenting files. From the outside, I could only make out corrupt scraps of junk data that had nothing to do with the databases in this host. It was all rounding errors and abandoned drafts; the flotsam and jetsam of an online system that would otherwise be deleted out of hand. Instead, it had found its way into the AI’s body.
Thinking quickly, I spun together a strand of resonance into an utterly alien data file then held it out to the frolicking AI, letting the fog fade just enough that it could see me. It was a tremendous risk that would be downright suicide against any program, but if its mind was even remotely similar to a flesh-and-blood animal then I was in with a chance.
The AI spotted me immediately, of course. I could feel the weight of its attention on me in a caress of alien datastreams. It knew what it was supposed to do in a situation like this; raise the alarm and receive a parcel of data as a reward. If I’d been anyone else, it might have done so, but I was gambling on the likelihood that I was the first technomancer it had ever encountered.
Curiosity was one of the hallmarks of sentience. It was what had drawn the AI to my enshrouding fog and it was what had it edge closer towards me, swimming around my persona before its attention finally lighted on the resonance-made file in my outstretched hand.
I let go of my hold on the data, leaving it to float freely in the matrix, and the AI immediately rushed forwards. I didn’t know what to expect until the AI coiled itself tightly around the file, driving its pseudo-ribs into the resonance as it drew the alien data out and into its spine, its code shimmering in something akin to delight.
With its hunger sated by the single most interesting meal it had ever eaten, the AI circled me twice once more before swimming off into the host. I let out a metaphorical breath, hurriedly reforming the fog around me. I’d be trembling if I could, instead it felt like my mind was operating on a disjointed staccato beat.
One by one, I drew close enough to discern the broad function of each node I came to, passing over NYPD Inc’s criminal database, the stock trading records of Renraku’s financial services AI and the orbital satellite telemetry of Ganbare Aerospace, a Renraku-owned subsidiary, before finally finding the comparatively smaller node that hosted the North American hub of the ‘Myo’ telecommunications network.
As I pushed my way into the system, I was very careful not to interact with it in any way that a programmer wouldn’t. I wanted to keep any trace of my presence as minimal as possible, which meant going around obstructions rather than through them.
It took me a while to make sense of the filepaths, but eventually I was able to navigate my way down from folder to folder until I’d reached the section that contained client data. Part of what set the Myo network apart from the competition – at least, according to the brochure – was that each package came with its own private network, so in the unlikely event of a data breach only a handful of people would actually be affected. It also disincentivised random scraping, as you’d never be able to get the data of more than a single family or business group.
Of course, that same business model suited my purposes exactly.
I found what I was looking for filed under A for Anders, with a long string of appended address and service data that only helped confirm that I had the right location. There were about two dozen different devices paired to the network; enough commlinks, tablets, laptops and sundries to cover every member of the Anders family and all linked to a network in miniature right before my eyes.
It would have been trivial to leave my mark in the node but it would also have been trivial for Renraku to find it in even the most basic file integrity check. Instead, I sent it out in a routine upload/download transmission that occurred every two seconds, ensuring the data on each device was synced with the cloud and vice versa.
It would allow me to directly access the devices from outside the network without the inherent risk involved in routing the tap through this central Renraku hub.
I didn’t check whether I was successful – again, there was too much risk involved in receiving transmissions to this host – but I did allow myself a small feeling of satisfaction as I turned away from the node.
That feeling was smothered in its crib as I saw the AI swimming across the host towards me, dragging the Duke along behind it with all the eagerness of a puppy who wanted to show its favourite person the cool new thing it found.
I didn’t even stop to think, just darted across the host in an instant and dragged a spike of resonance down the length of the programmer’s persona, overloading the firewalls of his old tech and leaving a great rent of fragmented data in his cyberdeck. It wasn’t enough to dump him out, but it did stun him for the vital second I needed to act.
I screamed, spilling a chittering, writhing storm of resonance out of my persona and into the host. The AI shuddered, its ribs jerking and flickering like static while I drew together another resonance spike, far denser than the first.
I picked a target at random, driving the spike into the Sioux military network before flooding junk data through the breach I’d created. The defence grid’s firewalls writhed like a living thing but my attack had already spilled through into the network, exploiting a directional weak point the system’s designers thought could never be reached.
The vivid red glow of the node flickered as code struggled and failed to travel down pathways that had been warped by the influence of my alien data. Automated repair software and partial rollbacks were already being activated across the system, but that would take time.
For the next thirty seconds, give or take, the Sioux Nation’s border with the United Canadian and American States would go entirely unmonitored. Hopefully that would be a big enough smokescreen to hide my real purpose.
I felt a sharp pain ripple through my very essence as the AI wrapped itself around me, its ribs digging into my persona and draining the very life out of me. Hurriedly, I tore frantically at the protosapient, trying to dislodge it even as I spun together a wasp sprite from the leaking essence the AI wasn’t able to consume in time.
With a herculean effort and an almost indescribable stab of pure agony, I was able to prize the AI off my body and fling it away with a targeted burst of force. A single thought was all it took to have the wasp go in for the kill, harrying the AI in a duel between the wildlife of the matrix and the resonance realms.
I had no intention of staying to see which emerged on top, instead diving back through the programmer’s persona and emerging out into the datacentre’s host.
“Run!” I shouted through the shared channel the moment I could access it again.
For all her laid back insolence, Imp didn’t even hesitate as she threw open the door and sprinted out into the corridor, drawing her pistol so fast I couldn’t even catch the motion before she put a burst of three bullets into a turret that had emerged from the ceiling.
She rounded the corner, kicking off the far wall to help her turn before shoving aside a cooler-suited programmer who was watching her slack-jawed, a cup of soykaf flying from his hand. Another turret fell to a tight burst of shots before she practically ran into her first metahuman security guard; an ork in a utilitarian black uniform who didn’t even have a chance to raise his submachine gun before she slammed the butt of her pistol into his throat.
In the matrix, I had my own problems to deal with. The entire datacentre had gone onto full alert, with IC materialising all around me as the host’s immune system tried to purge itself of infection. I was surrounded by a wailing, thrashing mob of programs each trying their best to rip my persona to shreds like a pack of feral dogs.
There was no form to them. Each was a mere geometric shape that evoked their true function, their attacks uploaded directly without any unnecessarily flair for the benefit of trideo-rotted meat brains. There was something terrifying about it; here was a megacorporation that came close to seeing the matrix as I did.
I drove a spike into a rotating red cube, fragmenting it into nothingness even as another attacked me from the side, digging in a barbed program that pulled at my neurons, slowing me down. I kept up a constant scream, resonance spilling out of me as a million burning fireflies even as I simultaneously sliced out at IC, spun together a trio of sprites and kept Imp’s physical location on the periphery of my consciousness.
“Elevator!” I shouted, even as I allowed a crackling storm of red circuitry to send a jolt through my persona, tanking the blow so that I could divert part of my strength to forcing open a pair of elevator doors.
In meatspace, Imp shot another security guard at point-blank range before sprinting towards the slowly opening metal doors. Her stride was relentless and unfaltering, even as the doors opened to reveal nothing but an empty shaft. Without a second thought, she dove with a partial front flip into the void, firing a last upside-down burst at a human with a submachine gun before wrapping her thighs around the cable and sliding down the shaft, continuing headfirst into perfect darkness as I slammed the way shut behind her.
Her rapid descent freed up precious seconds in which I could devote my attention solely and completely to the matrix. The IC had its hooks in me, each chink in my armour a breach they could use to flood me with data. It was agonising, each attack feeling like my very soul was being frayed away. I couldn’t repair the damage – couldn’t bring enough of myself together to even make the attempt – but each line of attack was a vector I could use.
I dove deep into myself, twisting the underlying essence of my persona until it resonated with the incoming attacks, sending back sonorous echoes of reflected damage that began to shake apart the most effective IC. My wasps dove in and among the swarm, dancing to my tune as they prioritised the weakened countermeasures to reduce the sheer amount of assailants that harried me.
Aisha was level with the sixth floor, the fifth. I dove back into the elevator system and wrenched open the doors to the third floor, just above the stationary elevator car, and watched through her visor as she twisted herself around the cable and leapt out into the corridor, rolling as she landed and sprang up into the face of the corporate samurai.
He raised his rifle with the preternatural speed of wired reflexes, only for Imp to slap it aside and grab hold of his wrist, pulling him towards her before ducking under his left shoulder. When she turned back to look at him, the rifle was on the floor and the samurai’s katana was in Imp’s hand.
I watched in appalled, powerless disbelief as Imp abandoned her flight in favour of swinging the sword with all the grace of a circus performer, only for the samurai to hurriedly draw his wakizashi and block the longer blade with the clang of steel on steel.
Another attack dragged my attention away from the feed. The IC facing me was new; an ominous red prism pulsing with black light. Its attacks stung like nothing I’d felt since coming face to face with the Yakuza hacker on my first real job. Black IC. They weren’t trying to brick my persona and track my location anymore; they were trying to kill me.
A pair of personas were hovering on the periphery of the fight, datastreams linking them to their programs as they directed the IC like they were playing a strategy game. I snarled, battering aside one program after another as I forced my way through the melee, using my sprites like living shields to intercept attacks and cut a path out of the rapidly-accumulating graveyard of scrapcode and diffused resonance.
The security spiders reacted as I’d desperately hoped they would, dismissing some of the host’s countermeasures as they redirected the processing power to form a wall of Barrier IC between them and whatever the insane technomancer had planned. I could only imagine what I looked like to them, but at the last second I jerked away and made one last rush at Imp’s suit.
“Stop fucking around and run!” I shouted through her earpiece. “Down the corridor, third office on the right! Through the window, cross the mall’s roof and rendezvous in the parking lot! Going offline now!”
Before I closed the feed, I was just able to catch sight of Imp abruptly changing a forward stab into a downwards swing that slammed the katana into the samurai’s rifle, lodging the blade in just above the magazine. She rolled under a blow from the samurai, kicked out at his shin then used the momentum of her kick to spring to her feet and resume her flight.
I followed suit, hacking away the hooks that had infected my persona before finally leaving the host and the matrix behind.
Real, physical pain flooded through my nervous system, jolting me awake so strongly that my back arched and I slammed my face against the ceiling of the coffin. Acting on instinct, I reached for my gun, shuffling forwards over the plastic mattress, now coated in a thin layer of sweat, with a patch of blood near where my head had laid and another on the ceiling where I’d spasmed so hard I’d broken my nose.
I drew my gun before kicking the coffin door open, wincing at the sound of metal shrieking and plastic snapping. The moment my feet hit the floor I swayed, stumbling forward until I was able to rest an arm against the vending machine to save myself from falling forward.
I wanted to lie down. I wanted to sleep for eighteen hours straight, to take some magic pill that’d clear the fog from my head, to be wheeled out of here by the divine intervention of another CrashCart ambulance crew. Instead I tightened my grip on my pistol and stumbled down the corridor, a blurred image that might have been a human man in a cheap suit pressing himself against the wall of coffins to get out of my way.
More blurred figures fled at the sight of me as I shambled my way into the elevator and down to the ground floor, where the bright lights of the small strip mall felt like staring into the heart of a thousand suns.
Someone blocked my path, shouting words I couldn’t understand while his partner spoke frantic words I couldn’t hear into her shoulder. I could make out peaked caps, ballistic vests and a gun in the man’s hand.
My own hand rose up almost on automatic, the cybernetic limb guided unwaveringly by the signal coming off the smartlinked standard issue Minutemen Security Services pistol. I squeezed the trigger, a trio of shots flying straight and true into the pistol and the hand that held them. The man’s partner grabbed him by the shoulder and pulled him aside, throwing down her own gun and kicking it away as I switched my arm’s target lock to her AR-linked NeoNET cybereyes.
Part of my consciousness returned as I staggered out of the commercial building; enough to feel blissful relief as a familiar van pulled up in front of me, the side door sliding open as Regent and Tattletale rushed out, the former keeping his eyes trained on the building behind me while the latter prised the gun from my metal fingers and guided me by the arm into the back of the van.
I slumped down onto the floor, leaning against the back of the front seats as someone pulled the door shut and Bitch drove us out of the compound at a steady pace, already cycling the van’s GridLink RFID chip so that we’d blend into the constant flow of commercial traffic.
I knew Tattletale was trying to get my attention, could see Imp staring down at me from one of the seats, her mask off and an indeterminable expression on her face, but I needed to make sure I’d done it.
Carefully, I sent out one last pulse of data out into the matrix. A microsecond later, I received a response from dozens of different devices, each linked to me by a solid tether of data that logged even the slightest piece of activity. Already my mind was racing with the desire to pour through the private secrets of the ultra-rich, but I wasn’t sure I’d be able to comprehend even a single word in the state I was in.
Instead, I forwarded access to the data tap on to Calvert’s system, not even waiting for an acknowledgement before I clasped Tattletale on the shoulder, flashed her a weary but triumphant grin and finally allowed myself to surrender to unconsciousness.