Chapter 12. Futureproofing
“What is this place?” I asked Gloss as we walked into the transparent atrium.
At least one answer was obvious: we were moving through the luminous core of one of the megatowers at the center of Carthage. While the city featured many types of business districts laid out in street grids—financial, design, industrial—this was the newest, the largest, and the most Euclidean of the grids. Rather than being constructed by cranes as were the smaller downtowns of the former cities ringing this one, in the Neurocapital District the buildings had been cultured from fungal polymer within a frame of metal and geosynthetic aggregate that assembled itself just ahead of the fungus.
The result was something that looked like a cross between a grievously elongated and twisted cathedral and a piece of hard candy. From within the atrium, I could hear the roar of fountains and air circulators, and could see the offices ringing the hollow core of the building going all the way up.
In the center of the atrium was a single glowing filament, which generated something like sunlight while also containing the densest collection of neurosynethtic processors in the structure. In other words, the building cogitated so hard that it lit up like an Edison light bulb.
Blue sky was visible though windows running all the way up the superstructure. Here and there, I could see window cleaning robots spraying down the glass, and in one place, a freerunner climbing up the window using suction-enabled gloves and boots.
“This is FUTUR Design’s headquarters,” Gloss said. We were both dressed in gray suits, neither cheap nor expensive, nanotailored by drones operated from Sri Lanka in Enrique’s apartment about an hour ago.
My phone vibed just as we came inside: Dr. Rashida Qin wanted to share the results of her search with me. I smiled to myself, excited to have the chance to speak with the doctor again. I still had some cash and wanted to ask what else she could do for me.
For now I was on the job.
Our hair was all wrong for the business world, but we could have been start-up bros seeking investments. In other words, we weren’t so out of place that security wouldn’t let us in the building. Gaining access to higher levels than this one was going to be tricky, if that was Gloss’s plan. Frustratingly, he hadn’t told me.
“Yes, but what do they do here?” I said just as we stopped by the coffee kiosk, Gloss trusting me to order for him—green tea, hojicha if you have it, well, OK, genmaicha is fine, please don’t let the water boil—before ordering an espresso for myself.
After a few minutes of sipping quietly, my empty demitasse ringed with hardened crema in front of me, Gloss said, “They decide when, where, and how to deploy new simulants.”
“Is this where they design simulants?”
“I don’t doubt that there are some senior designers working here—mostly recollectors instead of midwives—but most of the design work takes place elsewhere.”
I wanted to know if we were going to make a run here. “Is this the facility that—”
Gloss held up a hand in warning, although I knew enough to stop myself. “No,” he said.
“What’s our purpose in being here then?”
“To see something. There,” Gloss said, and pointed up.
My eyes followed the track of his finger and I found myself looking at something perhaps a dozen levels up. He was pointing to a woman in a long white coat walking along the corridor that was open to the atrium. Something about her filled me with a sense of calm and also anxiety.
She carried a translucent blue tablet in one hand, and was ringed by a golden halo of disembodied heads talking to her. My eyes focused and I could see that she was around fifty years old, that she wore her gray-blond hair in a long, loose braid—the kind of old-lady affectation that I wouldn’t have guessed would go over well in the business world—and that the glowing heads around her were watching her deferentially.
“She must be important,” I said, explaining what I saw to Gloss.
“You can see all that from here?” Gloss said. He appeared skeptical.
“I’ve always had great distance vision.”
He watched me for a moment more before leaning in to whisper. “Her name is Delilah Vyskocil, FUTUR Design’s chief network architect.”
I watched as she vanished into an elevator bank.
“Are we going to try to talk to her?”
“We’d never make it onto her schedule. No, our goal is different.”
Just then, the elevator at the ground level of the atrium opened and Delilah Vyskocil strode out, still ringed by the glowing heads, and followed by an young blond man who was clearly her secretary. Gloss reached into his jacket pocket and unfolded a translucent blue tablet that looked identical to the one that Chief Architect Vyskocil was carrying.
“Here,” he said, handing me the tablet. Then he told me what he wanted me to do.
I stood, the tablet in my hands, as I approached her. Up close, I could see that her long white jacket was inlaid with a labyrinth of gold thread, almost like circuitry. I started to speak as I was about five feet away from her.
“Excuse me, ma’am?”
She looked up at me and tilted her head, evaluating me in such a way that I felt like she saw all the way through me. The disembodied heads floating around her turned and watched me as well. They were almost all men, middle-aged, with regrettable hair and servile, self-satisfied faces.
For a moment her expression softened, and was full of warmth. It felt like she wanted to talk to me.
Then she shivered and a cold, businesslike expression came over her.
“Speak to my secretary, young man,” she said.
This novel's true home is a different platform. Support the author by finding it there.
Her secretary stepped forward, interposing himself between me and the chief architect. He was built like a defensive lineman but he carried himself like a lawyer more than a security guard. He held a bulkier tablet with thick, trapezoidal rubber corners that made it look like it was built to survive a warzone.
“What is your name and company, sir?” he said. Behind the secretary I saw Delilah Vyskocil approach the coffee kiosk, set her blue tablet down, and accept a cup of coffee, which she held below her mouth. She breathed deeply of it, closing her eyes while I gave her secretary a story.
When I looked back, the chief architect was sipping her coffee and her tablet, which had been sitting on the marble counter of the coffee kiosk, was gone. I noticed Gloss already walking out of the atrium.
I held out the blue tablet to the secretary. “Your boss dropped this,” I said.
The secretary looked confused, and looked at his boss, who had finished her coffee and was looking around for her tablet on the counter, becoming quickly frustrated.
“Thanks,” the secretary whispered, and accepted the tablet from me.
I walked out of the atrium and found Gloss standing on the street, carrying a thin, rectangular foil pouch the size and shape of the chief architect’s tablet.
“Well done, little bro,” he said. “Let’s go take a look at this.”
We started walking toward the metro. “Won’t it have some kind of locator? Most tablets do.”
“Of course,” he said. “But we’re going to keep it as secure as we can. Most signal traffic can’t get through this mesh, and I have us a suite at the Hotel Faraday.”
“Most signal traffic.”
Gloss smiled. “You’re catching on quick. If there’s a neutrino-based locator installed in the tablet, we’re in trouble, but I’m not expecting that level of security for this. The information stored on it is likely to be not especially sensitive.”
“Then what’s the point of stealing it?”
“You’ll see.”
###
The Hotel Faraday was the nicest place I’d ever been inside. For one, it was quiet, with lamps that glowed like deep sea creatures.
“Bio-lights,” Gloss said. “They’re incapable of carrying signal traffic.”
The windows were inoperable and covered in a fine silver-colored mesh. I figured there was metal mesh behind the walls as well. The entire building, and also each room within, was a cage built to prevent signals from entering or exiting. It was among the most private spaces available in the city. There were no net ports in the walls, no wireless connections available. Being inside the room felt quiet in a way that nothing else ever had.
Gloss seemed uneasy as he set the foil pouch on the queen bed.
“You OK?” I said.
“It’s my implants. I feel like I can’t hear anything, can’t smell anything. Make sense?”
“I guess.”
“Once you’re significantly more modded, you’ll understand.”
Gloss unzipped the pouch and removed the tablet. It was still blue, but duller now, having powered down at some point since he’d lifted it. “Careful,” he said, and passed it to me.
“Why?” I was afraid to touch the thing, as if it might detonate. Maybe it was made from an explosive polymer. I’d seen that on stream before.
“It’s iced, but not with anything serious. Let’s have a look.”
Gloss gestured at the bag we’d picked up from the front desk. I opened the bag and found my console and laptop within. Funny—I hadn’t taken them out of the apartment today.
“Linney brought them over for us.”
My heart skipped a beat—I felt like I had missed a chance to speak with her. Anyway, I pulled the console and laptop and cables out of the bag, connected them together and to myself, and powered them on. I made sure that the icebreaker that Linney had coded for me was slotted and initialized. Then I threw Gloss another cable and he connected it to his own net port, on the side of his head. I held the last end of the cable in my hand. I looked through the thin zip-case of adapters that I found in the bag and located one that appeared to match the port on the tablet.
Screwing the adapter onto the cable, I looked at Gloss. “Ready?”
Gloss nodded.
I connected the cable to the tablet and powered the tablet on.
The sensation was not of driving down a midnight highway but of falling into a hole. We were in a quiet place, almost totally dark, me and Gloss, me appearing as an arrowhead and Gloss appearing like a slowly spinning top.
Before us was a compact, glowing cube, perhaps a representation of everything on the tablet. Around it, already in detail, was a simple wall. It was practically transparent, and felt much less complicated to the touch than the wall built by the child simulant Ludo.
I called my icebreaker and directed it to the wall. The sensation of current and processing was noticeable but much smoother than I had felt before. Something liquid, something like flowing water, came from my arrowhead and ate right through the wall.
“A complexity-zero ice, tradename Blank,” Gloss said. Although “said” wasn’t quite right. It was more like the words came to me as a vibration. “It’s harmless.”
We drifted inside. I felt the increasingly-familiar sensation of data rushing over me, names and images, something familiar and quite frightening, as if a picture of a toy I had loved and lost when a long time ago in childhood—
And then we were sitting in the suite in Hotel Faraday again. I disconnected us and looked at the laptop. It told me that it had copied everything that was on the tablet.
Gloss powered it down, disconnected us, and zipped the tablet into the foil pouch. “We’ll stick this in a vent on the BRUTE,” he said, “send it to the Shenandoah.”
As I was coiling the cables, Gloss looked at the laptop. “Got it,” he said.
“What’s that?”
“The name of the person in charge of the server we’re targeting. Her name is Bell Wolf.”
“That sounds like a stream character.”
Gloss neither seemed to agree nor disagree. “She’s real. Whether she’s human or a simulant, that I don’t know.”
“Really?”
“FUTUR will often put an autonomous simulant in charge of their servers. They’re reliable and incredibly dangerous. In some ways more dangerous than simulant ice. Autonomous simulants can be as creative as some humans but are less distractable and better at noticing patterns in information.”
“Patterns such as an intrusion attempt that is disguised to look like ordinary net traffic.”
“You got it.”
“So what do we do?”
“We need to find out everything there is to know about Bell Wolf. She’s going to be the one who gets the call when we run the server.”
I liked the sense of camaraderie and deep preparation going into this run. It felt more professional and less chaotic than my earlier forays into breaching servers. But something about this bothered me.
“Enrique said that this was a run to make some money. All this preparation makes me feel like what we are doing is more significant than that.”
Gloss was close to finished packing up our equipment. “We paid money for the name of a server that has a high density of saleable information. Then we noticed that the server is well-protected. It makes sense to invest money into the job. That’s how you futureproof it.”
“Futureproof?”
“Yeah. Things change quickly at the megacorps. Old leaders out, new leaders in. Old ice trashed, new ice installed. You need detailed, up-to-the-second intelligence before you run or you could be facing lethal feedback.”
I stopped winding cables so that he would know I was serious about this. “There’s nothing you’re not telling me?” I said.
He paused what he was doing, too. “If there’s something you don’t know, I don’t know it either.”
“Fair.”
I wanted to take another look at the data from the tablet when I had some time alone, and to go visit Dr. Qin. But Gloss was working me hard. I didn’t know when I’d ever have a moment for my own projects.
As we left the hotel for the BRUTE station to dispose of the tablet, I thought about what kind of person I imagined Bell Wolf to be. Young, serious, aggressive, all things that came to mind based on her name. I didn’t know her, but I was excited to do battle with her. It felt like a game to me. Perhaps that was a dangerous way to see it.
The ultrablue sky above, free of clouds, almost free of jet contrails, told me that I lived in a new world now, where I had the a chance to make something of myself.
Gloss’s Encyclopedia of Ice
Name
Bandwidth Monitor
Manufacturer
Panopt
Cost to rez
Low
Nguyen-Okafor complexity
2
Type
Puzzle
Subtype
Toll
Subroutines
1: stops runs from consuming more than low amounts of power