Chapter 11. Dirty Laundry

“What the hell were you thinking?” Enrique said when I came in the door. He and Gloss stood at the counter, looking at the screen of the laptop I had used earlier. It showed a White Tree server address.

They knew that I had used their equipment to make that unauthorized run this morning. Fine.

“You know what?” I said. “I’m tired of all this secrecy.”

“I’m not keeping secrets from you, Rawls, except those that I have to keep for your protection.”

“Yes, you are. You hid information about the water strider. And I bet you know more about what happened to Freya than you’re telling me.”

Enrique set his glass of seltzer down on the counter with his chrome hand. He did so carefully, as if working hard to control his anger. “Is that what you think is going on?” he said in a deadly quiet voice.

I was pissed and felt energetic. My conversations with Kent and Linney had me feeling like I was really a runner. I could handle this. “Run this server, it’ll be easy,” I said, imitating the serious way Enrique spoke. “Whoops, that ice was stronger than we thought and you almost died.”

“You are intentionally misunderstanding what I am doing for you.” Enrique’s voice rose, and its edge was sharp.

“What about what I’m doing for you? I’m the one who can get hurt.”

Enrique held a hand in the air as if to correct me, and then he paused, turned it palm up. “You’re right,” he said. “You were the one in danger.”

Suddenly I felt deflated and ashamed. Feeling rushed through my body. All I had wanted was for him to acknowledge that.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I shouldn’t have made that run.”

Enrique grunted. “That’s an understatement. Did you set up a proxy?”

I didn’t even know how to do that. “No.”

“So there’s no telling what kind of trouble you’ve drawn to us.”

I didn’t answer. It didn’t seem to be a question.

“If you’re going to act like that, you can’t be part of my crew,” Enrique said, but he said it with warmth, as if kicking me out would be for my own good.

Gloss looked at me and settled onto a bar stool. His tea, cradled in his big hands, created steam that washed over his face. He looked less sleepy, more attentive. He looked like all this emotion was too much for him and he was waiting for things to settle down.

Enrique walked out into the middle of the living room, his hands on his hips. “Hell,” he said. “I was starting to like this place.”

The way he was talking scared me. “Do you mean you have to move?”

“I’m not sure if I can stay here,” he said, “not if White Tree knows that a runner operating from my home is trying to breach their servers.” Enrique still looked angry. His skin was redder and his gaze had an intensity I had never seen before.

“Boss,” Gloss broke in, “look at it another way. The White Tree ice did its job. When they look at the logs, they’re going to see that that run was clearly the work of an amateur.”

The word “amateur” stung. But it felt like my only hope for staying with these two was if Enrique agreed with Gloss.

Enrique paced some more, his arms crossed in front of his body, his fingers stroking the stubble on his chin. “There’s some truth to that,” he said. “I have a contact at White Tree. She likes me, believe it or not, because as much trouble as I’ve caused her in the past, I haven’t done anything serious with White Tree in years. Whereas I have siphoned the accounts of White Tree’s main competitor, FUTUR Design, to the tune of tens of millions.”

“White Tree and FUTUR Design are competitors?”

“They’re at war with each other,” Gloss said.

Enrique nodded, tilting his hand back and forth, as if suggesting the possibility of quibbling with that description but deciding against it. “They spent ten years and cashed out billions in assets in litigation over who had the right to buy the start-up that created Carthage as we know it.”

“More than a few people died,” Gloss added. “Mostly deniable contractors.”

“Corporate paramilitaries,” Enrique clarified.

I jumped in. “I thought they were in different industries. White Tree is in pharmaceuticals and agriculture. FUTUR Design is in AI and architecture.” I was relieved that the discussion seemed to have moved beyond my screw-up and into corporate politics, a subject I may have found dull on any other occasion, but which I was very, very interested in at the moment.

“They’re in the same industry,” Enrique said. “And that industry is automation.”

“I don’t follow.”

“FUTUR wants to use simulants to automate human workers out of existence so that the only humans with any relevance are the owners, executives, and perhaps a select group of high-level professionals. In their world, the poor are contained to slums. White Tree is focused on making humans more compliant through medicine.”

“So,” I said, thoroughly enjoying the game we seemed to be playing, “FUTUR turns machines into people and White Tree turns people into machines.”

“Yeah, that’s fair.” Enrique seemed amused. He had taken a bottle of wine down from the cabinet and was working on it with a corkscrew. “I’m still annoyed with you, young son,” he said as he opened the wine. “But Gloss’s suggestion is well-taken. I have earned a little latitude with White Tree. I’ll use it to ask them to overlook your attempt at intrusion this morning.”

“Blame it on me,” I said.

“Oh, I will.”

“I mean, tell them you took me in, I borrowed your console without your knowledge, and you’ve kicked me out.”

“That’s no good. If they find out you’re still with me, then—”

“I’ll leave for real, then,” I said. “I’m ready.”

Unauthorized duplication: this tale has been taken without consent. Report sightings.

Gloss sat up straight. “You don’t know what you’re saying. You’re not ready.”

Enrique sipped his wine, and then opened a bottle of seltzer with a soft hiss and soaked a cloth with it. He put it in my hand and suggested I clean my blazer with it. “Gloss is right. You need to stay here for now.”

“I take it you’ve had some time to think about what we talked about last night,” Gloss said.

I nodded as I removed my blazer and blotted at the bloodstain. “I want to stay,” I said.

Enrique poured me a glass of wine. When I took it, he clinked mine with his. “From now on, you don’t make a run unless Gloss or me authorizes it. Got it?”

Even as I sipped the delicious and adult-tasting wine, I was annoyed. I wanted more independence. I wanted him to recognize me as a runner like Gloss or Linney. I wanted to show him what I could do.

Part of me wanted to say whatever it took for him to drop the subject, then later find a way to do what I wanted anyway, the way me and Freya used to skip school and go down to the river or break into the VRcade.

But I couldn’t lie to Enrique. He’d risked something to take me in, and I’d brought him trouble.

I settled on saying, “I’ll do my best.”

Enrique approached me as if he wanted to lay his heavy chrome hand on my shoulder but thought better of it. That itself felt like a gesture of respect.

“You want to do it on your own,” he said.

“Yeah.”

“I respect that. You’ll get your chance. Sooner than you might think. For now, I have a target for you.”

“White Tree?”

“I’m afraid not. Our operating account is running low. This is strictly a run to dig up some dirty corporate laundry and make some money in preparation for a later job I’m putting together. I want you and Gloss to collaborate on a run against FUTUR Design.”

The thought of working with Gloss cheered me up. I felt like I had so much to learn from him.

“What about you?”

“I’m going to sweet talk the good people at White Tree.”

“Is that safe?”

“It’s safer than some things, such as pretending that you didn’t try to breach one of their remote servers from a connection originating in this condo.”

Thinking back to my earlier lesson about how corps push active projects into their remote servers, I felt ashamed again. “I see your point. Hey, there’s one more thing. In the spirit of full disclosure.” I regretted saying that—I immediately felt a pang of conscience for not telling him about my eyes.

Enrique looked more concerned than angry now. He reminded me of my father at times when life was beating him down. “What’s up?” Enrique said.

“Someone was following me today. Like, right away.”

“Describe him.”

“Shaved head, long green coat, sunglasses. Kent had helped me buy a self-defense drone. I took him down with it.”

Enrique turned around and looked at Gloss. Gloss shrugged.

“This began this morning?” Enrique said.

“Yeah.”

“It’s likely too soon to be White Tree responding to the intrusion attempt,” Gloss said.

Enrique was nodding his head. “It also sounds unlikely that someone was trying to grab or kill you. Well, something to keep an eye on. Stay sharp.” Then he finished his glass of wine and headed for the door.

“You’re leaving now?” I said.

“Best time to reach my contact is this evening. I may be away for a few days. I have some other business elsewhere. Gloss is in charge. Do what he says. You’ll be all right.”

I felt better now. Growing up, whenever I made a mistake, Dad would either be angry for hours or completely sullen. I guess I couldn’t blame him. After Mom left when I was around two, Dad felt like it was me and him versus everyone else in the world, and he relied on me to be more grown-up than I was. And Dad had his share of troubles. His hometown had been drowned, from the bottom of Main Street to the church steeple, in a massive storm that raged unimpeded following the strip mining of the mountain above the town.

Dad never missed an opportunity to remind me that the world wanted us dead. Implicit in this reminder: there was no time to be a kid. I needed to be more grown-up than it was possible to be. But he couldn’t handle it when I failed.

Enrique was different. Sure, we’d had a fight, but it felt like a good fight. I felt more like I could trust him now that he had acknowledged that I was the one who could get hurt here. I watched him put on a tie and use one of those nanotech things that look like caterpillars to clean his suit. Then, with a wave of his hand, he went through the door.

I turned to Gloss. “Do you think we can take down this FUTUR Design target tonight?”

Gloss laughed. “This is going to be more involved than the runs you’ve made so far. Those took no preparation. This one will.”

“Where do we start?”

Gloss slid the laptop over to me, and struck a few keys. The network map shifted to feature a different server.

Glowing deep purple, this server swirled, pulsed, and vibrated on the virtual representation of the net. It was thicker and denser than anything I had seen before.

“We’re going to take a look at FUTUR Design’s Restoration Center. This is where they bring simulants online.”

“Restoration makes it sound like they’re bringing simulants back from the dead.”

“That’s one way of thinking about it. FUTUR Design considers all of simulant consciousness to be tied together in one braid of processes, so each time a simulant comes online, it’s not a new being but the restoration of a single thread.”

“They’re into self-mythologizing,” I said.

“All corps are. It’s one of the ways that they maintain the loyalty of their customers and shareholders.”

We moved to the couch together to talk it out. Gloss gave me the laptop and taught me some advanced commands to use with the network map, so that I could see the server up close and far away, the shapes of the things that surrounded it and the things it contained, as well as all of the things it was connected to.

“It looks like there’s more than one piece of ice on this server.”

“There are three,” Gloss said. “And none of them have ever been rezzed before, or at least not while we were looking, which means we don’t know what they are.”

I saw what Gloss was describing. There were three rings around the server, their edges indistinct and overlapping. I couldn’t tell anything about what kind of power those rings hid.

“Simulants?” I said.

“Could be. But they could also be non-simulant ice, either designed in-house or licensed from another corp.”

“But not White Tree’s red ice, I’m guessing.” I wanted to sound smart and knowledgeable I looked over at Gloss to see his reaction.

But his brow was creased. “Why not?” he said.

“Didn’t you say that FUTUR Design and White Tree were at war with each other?”

“Sure, but that doesn’t stop business. They still buy and sell from each other all the time. Each of them are so enormous that they almost have to.”

“What you’re saying is that we need to expect anything from the ice.”

“That’s right. And there’s another thing, too. They’ve installed a defensive upgrade in this server.”

“What does that mean?”

“It means something to amplify the power of the ice, but we don’t know what.”

I was aware that my hands had gone cold and sweat was forming at the waistband of my pants.

“Relax,” Gloss said. “I’ll be jacking in with you. We’ll do this together. And we have a few days to get ready. When we make the run, we’ll be well-rested and prepared. It’ll be fun. You’ll see.”

“Why do I get the feeling you’re trying to convince me of something?”

“I’m not, little bro. There’s always danger. There’s always the possibility of permanent trauma or even death. But it’s not likely, and it’s not like any of us knows how else to live, am I right?”

“I guess you’re right.”

“Good,” he said. He blinked, as if checking the time. “Let’s go out. See what we can learn.”

“Sounds great.”

“But you need a shower first. You look disgusting, although at least you’ve stopped bleeding.”

I laughed and got up to get ready. I hoped that we’d run into Linney again. I wanted her to see me working with Gloss.

Hanging from the door in my bedroom was another suit, this one less flashy and more businesslike. As I ran the shower and cleaned the dried blood from my head and neck, I thought about what it meant that I had a business suit waiting for me. I took it as a signal that I was going to do great things. Enrique and Gloss recognized my talent. That must be it.

In the bedroom mirror, dressing myself after my shower, I whispered, “Freya, this is all for you.”

The CheRRy’s Guide to the Hardware Store

Name

Vista Processor

Manufacturer

Panopt

Legal status

Legal if licensed for corporate use; otherwise illegal

Description

A mesh-sheath fitted to a net port’s wire

Cost

10K

Function

Designed to enable Panopt executives to engage in deep surveillance of their own employees, the Vista Processors is spyware that allows for greater data transfer. In other words, your boss knows what kind of porn you watch. Runners have repurposed the Vista to increase the amount of corporate secrets they can steal with each run.