Chapter 13: Sysop

Gloss and I made our way by metro to the public library. A squarish Brutalist building, all unfinished concrete with soot stains in the tiny craters, it was one of many branches all over Carthage. This was where to go if you wanted access to everything and wanted to be nearly-anonymous while you used that access.

Inside was dark and rich with humanity. People hunched at rows of glowing terminals, connected by VR goggles and net ports and old-fashioned screens with an air gap between eyeball and image.

Others sat at heavy, scarred century-old oak tables in small groups under banker’s lamps, reading paper books or tablets. The people at the tables could have been college students or street people or workers between shifts who couldn’t afford to rent a nap pod. There were families with young children playing with blocks. There were middle-aged people lining up for the seed catalog, the tool catalog. They came from all races and genders, all ages, modded and virgin. There was traffic in and out of the simulation rooms on the upper levels. The library seemed immense.

Over it all was a sense of enforced quiet, a shared understanding that if people did not respect the need for quiet, corporate enforcers would arrive and the whole thing would be shut down, sold off, and forever lost. The library was one of the only spaces in Carthage in which I’d seen such a mixture of people—some desperate, some hanging on, some with promising financial futures.

Gloss and I logged into adjoining terminals with fake credentials that Gloss had produced from a rubber wallet full of such things: ID cards and chips and bar codes and QR codes and Qube codes and Hyperqube codes projected by tiny holographic emitters. A whole city of people that he could be. Or I could be.

We asked what the net knew about Bell Wolf. Bell Wolf lived in Chicago and worked as a sysop in an infamous FUTUR Design tower called Niflheim, where the corp designed its most twisted security software, the kind not meant to kill but meant to inflict permanent trauma, the kind that had hurt Linney.

In fact, the server we were targeting was located inside Niflheim.

“I didn’t think that it was,” Gloss said. He sounded worried.

“Maybe they proxied it?”

“Must have,” he admitted. “Niflheim changes the game. Typically, for something like that, we want to have an agent in meatspace.”

“Is that possible?”

“On our timeline? No. The window for lifting this data is closing in a couple of days. I don’t have any current contacts in Chicago, not any I trust. We’re going to do the whole thing remote.”

“What does that mean for us?”

“It means that we can only attack their defenses on the net. There’s no one to sneak inside and pull the emergency shutoff lever for us.”

“Is that standard practice?” I said. “Having someone on the inside?”

“It doesn’t hurt,” Gloss said. “Unless the insider gets caught. Then it hurts a whole lot. You know, that’s why White Tree designed their mean red spider. No other ice is as good at noticing inside jobs. But I’m getting off the subject. What else did you learn about our sysop?”

I showed Gloss what was on my screen. “Bell Wolf grew up here, in Carthage, and moved to Chicago after college. She’s been assigned to Niflheim her whole career.”

“That story screams ‘simulant’ to me. Find out anything else?”

“In college, she was president of her university’s infosec club.”

“Shocking.”

“But look—she has a criminal record dating to her last year in college and the two years after. Shoplifting, stim possession, conspiracy to commit armed robbery. Her DNA is on the Registry.”

“The Registry is a permanent sanction,” Gloss said.

I pointed to a field that looked the name of a prison. “She did time, too.”

Gloss leaned over, the screen washing his face in blue light. “Now that is weird. Simulants don’t usually get convicted of crimes, and if they do, their organs get recycled. So maybe she’s biological after all. Why would FUTUR Design hire someone with that record to run security for them?”

“Because it takes a criminal to know a criminal?”

Gloss nodded as if to an inaudible beat. “You have a point, little bro,” he said. He leaned back in the chair and crossed his arms. “Let’s give her something familiar, then, to sink her teeth into.”

“What do you mean?”

“Not here.”

We rode the metro away from the library and an hour later arrived in a quiet old neighborhood in Winston, one of the far districts of the city, an old tobacco town. Gloss let us into a red brick townhouse that smelled pleasant and was furnished with furniture, groceries, and kitchenware.

“It’s a step up from that crash space, huh?” he said.

“Yeah.”

We sketched out the plan at the kitchen table.

“Let’s attack the server head on, armed-robbery style,” Gloss said. “I’ll come in hot, not at all trying to conceal what I’m doing. That should get her attention.”

“What do you think she’ll do?”

“Rez all her defenses and focus on me. Meanwhile, you try to sneak in. You will have to deal with ice, too, but simulants have a limited attention span.”

Suddenly there was a knock at the door. “Right on time,” Gloss said. He stood and went to the front, and then opened the door to admit two women: Linney, and a second, much taller woman, taller even than Gloss. This woman moved with power and determination. She was an athlete. Behind them, on the street, a battered white van pulled away.

“Rawls, this is Wren,” Gloss said, suddenly looking sheepish.

“Nice to meet you,” I said. “I’ve heard about you.”

“You have?” she spoke with a cracked, raspy voice and looked at Gloss, who looked away.

“Hi Linney,” I said.

She gave me a wave and then lifted two large duffels onto the kitchen table. She and I worked together to unpack the gear inside while Gloss and Wren spoke quietly to each other in the corner of the kitchen over a warming tea kettle.

This story is posted elsewhere by the author. Help them out by reading the authentic version.

Some of the gear was familiar, some unfamiliar. There were cables of all kinds, small monitors, and biological sensors. There were also three metal cases, warm to the touch and faintly vibrating under my fingertips, that I took to be icebreakers with internal power supplies.

“Did you get this from Gerty?” Gloss said, gesturing toward the street where I had seen the white van.

Wren nodded. “She delivers.”

“Are we running right now?” I said, feeling the excitement in the room.

Gloss and Wren and Linney all looked at each other. “Why not?” Gloss said.

“Seems like we’re not ready,” I said.

“Like I said, man, our window closes in a couple of days. The data we want is moving to deep storage and the buyer wants it now. We’re likely going to be facing simulant ice. I don’t want to spend hours and hours clicking through simulant ice and wake up to find our window has closed.”

“So we jack in together?”

“The boy’s got it,” Wren said. She crossed her muscular arms over her chest. They ran with animated mathematical tattoos, Gaussian curves as I learned about in school. “Me and Linney will be here to monitor your vitals and your local grid.”

While Wren hooked up multimeters to the equipment, Gloss and I went upstairs and put fresh bedsheets on the mattresses. It was evening and I was hungry, but I knew better than to eat a full meal before jacking in.

When we got the all-clear from downstairs we carried the equipment up. The house came equipped with a heavy-duty data port, a thick rubber hose terminating in a gleaming brass fitting. Gloss connected that to a console, and then connected each of the icebreakers to it.

“These are yours?” I said.

“Yeah. But you’ll still have your own. You’ll need it to slide through the innermost ice, assuming I can draw the attention of the others.”

“You’re assuming my breaker will be the correct type for the inner ice.”

“FUTUR Design runs platform ice on the inside of their servers, almost exclusively,” Gloss said.

He and I removed our shirts and stretched out on the twin beds. We drew the cables to our net ports. Linney and Wren sat on arm chairs in the bedroom. Overhead, a fan turned slowly.

Gloss offered a fist bump. “See you at the bottom of the server, little bro,” he said. I brought my knuckles to his, then twisted the cable into my port.

That familiar dark highway enveloped me, but with changes. I felt distant from myself. I could feel the lag between my thoughts and my arrowhead avatar’s movements. I could also feel the density and the gravity of the server. The data spires ahead of me were thick with information, tall and ominous. They practically vibrated with malevolent energy and were triple-ringed with unrezzed defenses. These had the familiar fuzzy appearance of low-hanging purple mist.

Next to me I saw Gloss’s avatar, as robust as he was in real life, blocky and aquatic, almost like a polygonal killer whale. He moved alongside me at first and then pulled ahead.

Spines began to protrude from Gloss even before the mist ahead coalesced. The spines lifted off the body of the whale and arrayed themselves around it, pointed at the heart of the server. Gloss’s breakers.

The outer ring of mist was changing, becoming denser at the place where Gloss’s current path was about to take him. It looked human, becoming a tall and well-built man with a long, hunting harpoon, perfectly tailored to kill whales. Around the man the mist formed a labyrinth enclosing the rest of the server.

I knew what I was going to do.

Meanwhile, I could feel the transfer of data and processing power as Gloss hijacked the rezzing process, stealing current that had been meant for the ice for our own purposes. Gloss’s breakers grew brighter, and then crashed into the labyrinth, the spines piercing the walls, smashing through layer after layer, as the hunter with his spear turned slowly, carefully, and began accelerating toward Gloss. Suddenly the ice’s spear became a hundred spears, all streaming toward my companion.

I started to thread my way through the labyrinth on the other, undisturbed side. I moved carefully, reminding myself not to rush, but to take as much time as I needed. The success of this run depended on the server’s defenses focusing on Gloss while I made it through. I didn’t have a breaker for shooter ice, which meant I had to use the limited attention-span common to simulants.

Gloss was almost through the labyrinth when the man with the harpoon caught up with him. Gloss, snapping around with tremendous force, brought all his breakers to bear on the man, sending them to perforate him. Some of the spines snapped and faded into the darkness of the server but enough of them connected. The hunter was caught, impaled and immobilized, and hung suspended there, where he would wait until the system reset him.

As Gloss crashed through the labyrinth, the middle layer of ice rezzed, its sharpness and density terrifying. My heart dropped. It was the same kind of ice, with another labyrinth and another hunter at the center of it.

“Hell,” I heard Gloss vocalize over some channel, but whether it was in netspace, meatspace, or the local wired connection that ran between us, I didn’t know.

Gloss’s whale, glowing dimmer than it had been, gained speed again and rushed the labyrinth. I could feel how taxing this was. Gloss was tired, and the spines of his breakers were less numerous and moved less vigorously. They managed to break through the walls, bringing Gloss closer and closer to the data spires.

Meanwhile, I had made it through the first labyrinth and crossed the gap to the second. I focused on my task, using the maze-solving skills I had had all my life to feel my way through. The sense that I had no real idea how much time was passing in the real world scared me.

I was halfway through that labyrinth when I noticed that Gloss and the second hunter were locked in a brutal struggle. Gloss’s spiny breakers were scratching and digging into the hunter, but the hunter’s spear had punctured Gloss’s killer whale avatar, causing it to thrash and lose momentum. Still, Gloss seemed to be getting the better of the hunter, who was also slowing and becoming weaker, hauling on the cord attached to its harpoon as Gloss’s spines carved and tunneled through him.

Gloss and I made it through the second labyrinth at about the same time, the floating body of the second hunter trailing behind Gloss on the cord attached to the harpoon that was sticking out of the killer whale.

The inner ring rezzed now, and with it, something behind it, at the center of the server. The inner ring was, simply, Ludo, playing with the same blocks that comprised his wall. For a moment I wondered if the child would remember me before realizing that this was likely a separate copy of Ludo.

Gloss crashed into the wall but couldn’t break through. Meanwhile, I felt my icebreaker warm and extend from me, Hungry Creek’s stream of water dissolving the blocks of the wall far from the place where Ludo was paying attention. As Ludo started to build the wall thicker and thicker where Gloss was thrashing, using the last of his force to try to dislodge the blocks in a futile effort to get through, I worked my way through the hole I had made—

And found myself face to face with a woman, chrome-skinned and hairless, who stood in the server before me. Smaller than any ice I had seen, she drew my attention in a way that I couldn’t control. I found myself unable to look away from her, unable to reach anything but her. Somehow, the data spires of the city receded from me, moving away at a terrifying speed as I neared the woman.

The closer I came to her, the farther I moved from my goal. She and I floated next to each other for a long moment.

Then I sat up on the mattress, soaked in sweat, clawing at the net port. I looked over at Gloss, who was still under, maybe still jacked in. Wren and Linney stood over him, each of them holding a monitor and looking down with concern in their eyes.

“Is he OK?” I said.

Wren said nothing. Linney looked up at me. “We don’t know yet.”

I could smell burnt plastic and hot, greasy metal. My feet felt warm, and it took a moment for me to realize that they felt that way because they were the closest part of me to the three metal cases of Gloss’s icebreakers, which were radiating heat from where they sat on the floor. Gloss’s eyes were still closed.

Gloss’s Encyclopedia of Ice

Name

Starbuck 1.0

Manufacturer

FUTUR Design

Cost to rez

medium-high

Nguyen-Okafor complexity

5

Type

shooter

Subtype

simulant; rigshooter; gray

Subroutines

trashes multiple pieces of software, including icebreakers; attempts to cause brain injury