Chapter 10: Freelancer

“You can purchase breakers if you know where to look,” Linney was saying as she coded. “Sometimes you can even find them out on the net, quarantined in corporate data vaults or even in the trash.”

“The trash?”

“Corporate archives,” she said after taking a sip of coffee. “Do you have any idea how much data a modern megacorp generates? It’s uncountable. They generate so much that even they can barely store all of it, let alone process it. Of the major megacorps, only FUTUR Design has functional data recovery systems in place. The rest? They just hope that we don’t go dumpster diving. Anything could be hiding in the trash.”

“Is that rule number three?”

“You got it. But while you can buy or find breakers, it’s better to make your own.”

I zoned out for a moment. I didn’t want to admit to her how clueless I was about any of this. I wasn’t a coder. I watched the people moving through the open air cafe with old, wrinkly shopping bags. I still hadn’t been able to shake the feeling of being watched. Eventually I noticed Linney looking at me, waiting for me to speak. “You don’t understand any of this, do you?”

“Not really.”

“That’s fine. Here’s what we’ll do. I’m going to write the basic structure of a breaker for you, and you can tinker with it as you learn more. This is a very flexible codebase that my mentor wrote for me when I started running. I’m passing it on to you.”

“Who was your mentor?”

“She was a painter. She retired a while ago, opened her own art gallery.” She shrugged, as if it were painful to talk about.

Turning her laptop to me, I saw that she had written a basic program. “Here,” she said. “You had better hang onto this while it’s compiling. It should be ready later today.”

Name Hungry Creek 1.0 Type Icebreaker Matching subtype Platform Base Nguyen-Okafor complexity 2 Cost to boost 2K for 2 complexity Cost to break 2K for 2 subroutines

“What are these costs?”

“Most breakers can find a place from which to infiltrate a piece of ice with a matching subtype. Ice like Ludo are based on old platformer video games: their security is all walls and bottomless pits. A breaker with a platform subtype can find a way to solve such games, but the more complex the ice is, the more processing capacity and electricity it takes for the breaker to find the solution. Anyone can buy processing and power on the open market, but it always costs money. And the number of subroutines is a measure of how capable an ice is. More subs takes more money to break, no matter how simple or complex the ice is.”

“If I’m reading this correctly, it takes 4K for this breaker to get through a Ludo?”

“That’s right.”

I whistled. You could heat and cool dad’s house for a couple years with that amount of money.

“It’s a bit inefficient for some odd-complexity ice,” Linney said. “But that’s good for Ludo.”

“Hey. Don’t you need your laptop back?” I said.

“Do you think I’d write your breaker on my personal laptop? This is just a machine I had laying around. You can have it. It looks like you don’t have one, yet.”

“Kent thought I didn’t need one.”

“That’s because Kent finds everything that he uses in the trash. The literal trash.”

We sat there in silence, not quite looking at each other and not quite looking away. It felt so good, sitting next to her, that I didn’t want the afternoon to end.

“Why did you start running, Linney?” I said.

“At first it was exploration. But then my family needed money. Don’t look so startled.” She sounded almost offended.

“It’s just a surprise, because you look so—”

“Preppy?”

“That’s exactly what I was going to say.”

“I’m trying to blend in at school. I think of myself as a spy, and this as my cover. When I was growing up, we were stone broke. I’d started messing around with the networks at school, reading my teachers’ mail and so forth, and figured I could use those same skills to make some money.”

I nodded along. My heart broke for the younger version of Linney, breaking the law because she thought she needed to.

“But you kept it up.”

“Yeah. After I got my parents current on rent—and they never asked how, they were too smart to do that—I built myself a college fund and worked hard at school.”

“I bet all that school hacking came in handy.”

She hit my shoulder playfully, but I could tell I had said something that hurt. “I never cheated in school,” she said quietly. “Everything I achieved came from here.” She tapped her head. I could see a place, on the side of her skull, where there were criss-crossing scars and something curved but almost rectangular just below the skin, as if a plate had been bolted in. I recalled what I had heard Enrique and Gloss say about permanent damage.

“I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have implied you had cheated.”

“Thanks,” she said.

“I’m new to all this.”

“I know you are.”

I turned to the barista and asked for another coffee. I gestured at Linney, who, much to my delight, also wanted another.

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“So you got yourself money for college and you aced high school,” I said.

“That’s right. I earned a spot in the mathematics program at the University of New Carthage.”

I whistled. “That’s hard to do.”

“That’s where I’m at. Still. I’ve run into some trouble.”

I nodded and looked at her. I wasn’t going to push her to tell me about it, but I hoped that she would trust me enough to let me in.

Our second coffees arrived, and I took the time to sip mine, savor it, all those delicious sweet and acidic and bitter and creamy molecules. She cradled hers in her hands, as if for warmth.

“Do you want my jacket?” I said, although she was wearing the same high-tech, long jacket she wore last night. It was strangely wrinkly, like the old plastic bags people carried here, and it was gray like concrete. But I had the sense that all of this was by design. It was one of those garments that didn’t look like much at first but that I could tell was quite expensive and probably highly functional.

She shook her head and reached for her zipper. “I’ll just turn up mine.”

She set her coffee mug down. “Listen, can I tell you something?”

“Sure.”

“Last year, I needed money for ... for a thing. To get it, I tried to do a deep dig on one of FUTUR Design’s central servers: their research and development division, which contained the plans for that year’s line of simulants. The jewels, so to speak. I had everything lined up, the hardware, the connections, to search through practically everything. I never should have made that run.”

“Why not?”

“I was tired, I was broke. I’m sure either Enrique or Gloss has told you about running against simulant ice when you’re tired.”

“Yeah.”

“When the ice rezzed, I realized my icebreaker couldn’t pull enough power to break everything. And I was too sluggish to outwit or outrun the thing. Next thing I know, I’m in the trauma ward at the med school up in Bull City with a plate in my head and some brand-new cognitive difficulties.”

All of the automatic responses that came to mind—I’m so sorry, or oh no, or wow, or that sucks, or guess you learned your lesson, or you did your best—seemed inappropriate. Words in general seemed ineffective.

I leaned forward and reached out my hands. She put hers in mine. “That sounds so painful,” I said.

“It was.”

“Are you OK now?”

She leaned closer to me. I squeezed her hands. She drew hers back, not as if she were unhappy with the contact, but as if she had taken what she needed from it. “Yeah,” she said. “I’m adapting. I don’t know if I’ll make it as a scholar. Earlier, I thought I’d do everything myself, without machine assistance. But now I realize that that idea’s bunk. We all have machine assistance, even if we don’t see it.”

I thought of my eyes. “I think I know something about that.”

“Yeah?” she said.

I told her what I had learned from Dr. Rashida Qin, told her about the dim reds and bright purples that other kids hadn’t been able to see, about getting through the neural python when I thought my breaker wouldn’t cut it. I didn’t tell her about the words that had appeared on banks of Hungry Creek.

Her eyes were red-rimmed as I finished my story.

“Thanks for telling me that, Rawls.”

“Of course. Hey, Enrique and Gloss don’t know.”

“Then I won’t tell them. Listen, I’m going to be late for class unless I go right now.”

“You better go, then. Thanks for the breaker.”

She hopped down from the stool and immediately looked concerned. Although she was my age, and was smaller than me physically, right then her posture suggested that she was protecting me. “Take it easy at first. That breaker is designed to grow with you. Don’t go trying to fight a mean red spider with that thing.”

“What does that mean?”

She was already turning away, pulling up her hood. She looked back. “It’s White Tree’s scariest ice. Once you see it, you’ll see it everywhere, in every fuzzy bit of netspace. Don’t go after anything valuable in a White Tree server until you’re sure you can handle it.”

Then she was walking through the crowd to the metro going north to UNC. A light rain had begun to fall, and as I stepped out from under the overpass, I felt it cool and soft on my skin. My electronics were safely zipped into the plastic shopping bag. I started moving toward a different metro stop. Eager to talk to Enrique and Gloss, I also wanted to try out my new rig.

In the curving tunnel on the way to the train, I caught a glimpse in a traffic mirror of someone with a shaved head in a long green coat and sunglasses walking behind me. I was sure that I’d never seen him before, and he wasn’t looking directly at me, but something in the way he moved told me: he’s following you. I lifted my shopping bag as I walked and unzipped it, palming the hornet, the small defensive drone that Kent told me to buy. I didn’t know how to control it, and didn’t know what it would do in an enclosed space such as the metro, but it felt good having it in my warm hand. I could feel the power switch, a small, ridged piece of metal cooler than the plastic frame.

Sitting on the train car, I could see a dim reflection in the tinted windows on either side of me. The man in sunglasses was several seats behind me, where he could see me clearly but I could only catch sight of him through the reflection. His knees were parted and between them was a silver tube. It could have been a thick umbrella or a thin flashlight. Or a weapon.

I exited one stop early and double-timed it up the stairs. Carrying my electronics, in pain from the morning’s botched run, I was winded and I could feel the guy getting closer. I kept moving between people ahead of me, zig-zagging so that he wouldn’t be able to get a clear shot at me. I was betting that he wouldn’t take the risk of greasing an uninvolved person, especially not in the dense camera-nest of a metro station.

On the street, things were different. I saw that I had picked a stop in a neighborhood that was deadly quiet during the day, as if every resident was in a cryogenic deep freeze beneath the city. It would have spooked me even if I were not being stalked. In a the dirty window of a storefront evangelical church, I saw him clearly, and he was moving faster now and closing, and holding the tube at his side exactly as if it were a weapon.

Now. I flicked the switch on the hornet, and felt the vibration of its motors spinning up a moment before I felt the wind of the rotors against my palm. At the same time I took off running. The weight of the bag combined with my total exhaustion made my legs bend deeply, almost buckle, my thighs suddenly refusing to carry my weight at a running pace. I went down on one knee and then got up to my feet again, clutching the shopping bag tightly against my chest to make running easier.

Then I heard it. The sound that came from behind me was like a sheet of paper being torn in two, followed by a yowl. I looked back to see the man in the green coat thrashing on the sidewalk, and the drone a smoking pile of plastic next to him, tiny flames flickering amid its barbs.

I doubled back and ran past him, straight down the steps and into the metro again. Swiping my wrist, I heard the train beginning to leave and managed to jam my arm between the doors and force them open. Safe in the seat, all I could think about was getting back to Enrique’s.

By the time I had exited the train, I didn’t even remember riding on the metro. I was a ghost or an automaton.

I found the apartment building, rang the bell, and waited as someone buzzed me in. I climbed the stairs and found the door open, which sent a cold feeling down my spine.

Were they here? Corporate security? Perhaps the shaven-headed guy was only there to watch my movements. Perhaps this was where the real killers awaited me. If so, it made little difference whether I stepped forward or retreated down the stairs.

But when I stepped through the door into the apartment, there were no corporate security officers, no hired assassins, no one but Enrique and Gloss standing at the bar. The laptop was open showing the server map, with the White Tree server that had dumped my connection in the center of the screen.

Gloss held a mug of tea, as always, its woody scent everywhere. Enrique held a glass, not of wine or whiskey but of seltzer water. He looked grave.

“You’re bleeding,” he said and pinched his earlobe.

I glanced to my side, and saw that this time the blood had dripped onto my new blazer, leaving a red stain with a blackened ring around it.

They knew.

Gloss’s Encyclopedia of Ice

Name

Mean Red Spider

Manufacturer

White Tree

Cost to rez

very high

Nguyen-Okafor complexity

5

Type

Shooter

Subtype

Red; indexer

Subroutines

3: bleeds a runner, can be lethal even to healthy, well-rested runners; hides sensitive data from intruders; resistant to most runner tricks, except for icebreakers tuned to shooter ice