Chapter 14. Emergency Shutdown

I couldn’t remain in the same room with Gloss while he was still under. I disconnected the last of the cables from my body and stood shakily. Grabbing a towel from the bathroom, I wiped myself off, then put my face under the faucet and sipped some water. I remained in there for a long time, my breathing ragged.

When I returned to the bedroom, Wren had knelt next to Gloss and was stroking his forehead. Linney held the monitor with both hands now, keeping it close to her eyes, and was muttering numbers to Wren that I didn’t understand.

After a long moment, Gloss opened his eyes. “That was rough,” he said. He looked at me. “Did you make it in, little bro?”

“No,” I said. “But I think I met Bell Wolf.”

I leaned against the wall. We were all quiet. Somehow I had thought that if Gloss were running with me, we couldn’t lose. But the run had been botched. I didn’t know where we went from here.

It turned out that it was early in the morning now, before sunrise. Outside the windows of the rented townhouse the edge of the sky was just starting to turn pale. Gloss and I had been jacked in for almost seven hours while Linney and Wren monitored meatspace.

Something about that bothered me. Maybe Gloss should have taken one of them with him instead.

Gloss showered for a long while, clearly shaken by the experience. While we waited for him to finish, I brewed coffee for Linney and Wren and myself. Sitting over our mugs downstairs, I asked in a hushed voice, “What do you two think happened?”

“The ice tried to attack his brain,” Linney said, her voice trembling. “The first two were Starbuck 1.0s, whale hunters. Runners can typically avoid harm from those models by drawing a high amount of power through the connection, and then moving faster and getting away. I think Gloss made it out before he got hurt. His icebreakers, on the other hand, are gone.”

“All of them?”

Linney nodded. “The first Starbuck got one of them and then the second Starbuck got the other two. We didn’t expect FUTUR Design to rez two Starbucks in a row.”

“Well, kids, that’s the good news,” came Gloss’s voice from upstairs. We heard the stairs creak as he descended, dressed in a clean white t-shirt and toweling off his long hair. “While I stood under the hot water contemplating our failure, I had an idea.”

Gloss being Gloss, he refused to say anything else until he had performed the entire ceremony of boiling a kettle of water, waiting until it had cooled to some precise temperature that he measured with a metal probe, measuring the tea leaves, and waiting for them to steep.

Linney and I looked at each other, too tired to guess at what Gloss was going to say, too tired to express annoyance at him for making us wait. Wren was reading a book. She looked amused.

When Gloss sat down with us he said, “Bell Wolf went way over budget on this one. She made FUTUR Design spend a fortune to protect that server.”

“How do you figure?” Wren said.

“Two Starbucks and a Ludo,” Gloss said. “That’s got to be at least thirteen billion in ice just to keep us out, and that’s not accounting for how much cash they pumped through Bell Wolf’s custom defenses, which seem to have defeated young Rawls here.”

Gloss waited for it to sink in for the rest of us. But it didn’t. I glanced at Linney, but she avoided my eyes. Wren and I looked at each other, confused. Then we looked at Linney together. She wasn’t avoiding my eyes, in fact she was deep in thought.

Gloss drummed his fingers on the table. “I think we can get in,” he said.

“I’m not seeing it,” I said. I figured if any of us had to admit they didn’t know what was going on, let it be me. I was a beginner and had no ego to protect.

But it wasn’t Gloss who explained; it was Linney. “FUTUR Design might not have the cash to activate any other defenses right now.”

“That’s right,” Gloss said.

“But the defenses in our target server are still up,” Linney continued, “so we have to find the right place to breach to shut them down again.”

“We can do that?” I said.

Wren reached over and opened up one of the laptops she had bought from the supplier she called Gerty, then turned it around. Gloss pointed to something on its screen, a network map, a connection between the target server and another one. “This is FUTUR Design headquarters in the Neurocapital District. If we can breach it, we can inject an emergency shutdown command to the defenses in the Niflheim server, a priority override straight from FUTUR’s nerve center: you’ve spent too much money, shut it down. So in a way, it’s like the plan I described earlier. We’ll be our own insider.”

“Headquarters looks heavily defended,” I said.

“Well, it is,” Gloss said. “Of course it is. But we’re going to approach the headquarters run differently than the Niflheim run. Instead of coming in loud and aggressive, we’ll go in very lightly, with the most minimal net presence we can assemble, the lightest rig. When a runner goes in light, the corp has to spend extra resources on targeting their defenses. Most of the time, runners won’t go in light because when they do, they don’t have the bandwidth to take data out of the servers. But we don’t care. This time we won’t come in with data exfiltration routines, because we’re not even trying to steal data from headquarters. The only thing we’re trying to do is to inject the shutdown command.”

“How do we go in light?”

I felt all their eyes on me. “That’s where you come in,” Gloss said. “You have the fewest implants and the most minimal rig. That means you have the best chance of getting in.”

I looked at the clock on the laptop. “If there’s simulant ice on HQ and we need to get back into the target server, I’m betting that we need to run again right away.”

Stolen from its rightful place, this narrative is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

“That’s correct,” Gloss said.

Linney lay a hand on my arm. It was the best feeling in the world. It made me tingle all over. “We’ll be here with you. At the first sign of trouble, we’ll jack you out.”

I finished my coffee. That criminal brashness that Enrique and Gloss displayed was coming to me. “Let’s get me jacked in,” I said. Then I turned around and walked up the stairs.

I swapped out the sweaty sheets for a fresh set and brought them downstairs, starting a load of laundry while Gloss and Wren huddled over the laptop, writing a new program. “Don’t worry, little bro, when FUTUR Design sees you, they’ll think that you’re no more dangerous than a mayfly. They’re not going to rez anything big against you.”

“Excuse me if these assurances are starting to make me more suspicious than comfortable.”

Gloss laughed. “You’re learning. Maybe I’m just trying to reassure myself. But there’s a reason I brought Wren. She’s good at sensing shooter ice the moment before it rezzes. If they try to hit you with anything dangerous, she’ll get you out of there.”

“Ready,” Wren said. Upstairs again, she connected the laptop to my console. “This is going to feel different,” she said. “You’ll be a lot faster. The key is not to tangle with the ice. Just get in, find the right access point, inject the command, and jack out.”

Linney watched me from the armchair. With her head cocked, her smile slight and knowing, her men’s broadcloth shirt open a few buttons, she looked studious and desirable. For a moment, I felt like all I wanted was for her to admire me. I held the cable near my net port on my bare chest. I felt proud.

“I’m ready,” I said.

Immediately it felt different. Gliding along the invisible dark highway toward the infinite skyline of FUTUR Design’s HQ, I could feel the prickle of numerous ice subroutines sweeping over me. They were thin tendrils of light, connected to a honeycomb that was already rezzed.

From my conversations with Gloss, I recognized the honeycomb as a Panopt Bandwidth Monitor, nothing scary at all.

The tendrils reached out across the distance. But my presence was tiny, not even an arrowhead, just a point of light, the same as innumerable other points passing over and under me, legitimate corporate traffic perhaps. The ice wasn’t sophisticated, didn’t feel intelligent like Ludo or Starbuck or hardened like the Blank or Membrane. Instead, it felt like something watching me.

I passed through the honeycomb and then out the other side, feeling only a slight drag on the amount of current my connection was drawing as I crossed the ice. The processor in my console passed me off as something that was supposed to be here, and the ice bought it.

Past the first of the defenses, I reminded myself to be calm. Still, I could feel my heart beating even in netspace. My encounters with unknown ice had been so difficult, and sometimes painful, that I didn’t understand how the other runners weren’t perpetually terrified of the megacorps’ hidden defenses. Yet, somehow they weren’t, not even those who had been scarred by them.

The purple mist of the inner ice shifted as it began to rez. It looked like FUTUR Design was willing to spend even more cash to keep me out.

Time to test Gloss’s theory. Was I about to slam face-first into something vicious or would this be something relatively modest?

I found myself in a field of red-gold wildflowers before a young girl picking them. She wore a long, thick dress. Her hair was the same color as the flowers, and flowed down her back. I could smell the flowers, and theirs was the first non-artificial smell I had encountered in the net.

The girl reminded me in some ways of Ludo, but in other ways she felt different. She had built no wall to stop me, for one thing. For another, her attention was different than his, more complicated.

She looked up at me with an expression that was not quite playful and not quite suspicious. It seemed like she hadn’t made up her mind about me. Instantly I could tell that she was intelligent, much smarter than the Bandwidth Monitor that had just let me through.

“Are you passing by?” she said.

“Yes,” I said.

“Do you mean to harm me?”

“I do not.”

“Pass,” she said, and I continued on past her, feeling again a drag on the current drawn through my console and on its processing power, a stronger drag than I had felt from the Bandwidth Monitor but nothing serious.

Suddenly I was past all the ice and drifting among the towers of FUTUR Design’s headquarters. I could see traffic moving in and out of them but unlike other times that I’d reached the center, or bottom, of a server, the data didn’t wash over me in an overwhelming rush.

Instead I followed the instructions Wren had given me, looking for traffic that was connected to ice, and connected, distantly, to Niflheim. The network map loaded into my minimal rig helped me find the tower that was monitoring the status of ice in remote servers. Once I found it, I let loose a simple instruction wrapped in an envelope of the forged authority of Chief Architect Delilah Vyskocil, a transparent bubble that hardly drew power at all, and let it float into the tower and rise to the top.

Back in the townhouse, I saw Linney and Wren watching at me with satisfaction. Gloss was elsewhere. I wiped the sheen of sweat from my chest and stretched my limbs. Wren hunched over her laptop. “It looks like Niflheim’s ice has derezzed,” she said. I swapped consoles, using my regular build this time, with icebreaker and data exfiltration routines slotted.

Wren looked up. “Ready?”

“Yeah,” Linney said before I could answer. She was unbuttoning her shirt and climbing into the other bed. She looked across at me. “You and I are running together. Gloss needs time to recover, and he lost his breaker, anyway.”

She said all this casually as she removed her shirt. I looked away, suddenly uncomfortable but also not sure why I was uncomfortable. Linney was plenty comfortable.

I reached over to give her a fist bump. “Let’s go, nonlineardynamics.”

Our knuckles touched.

The familiar appearance of the target server grew larger as we approached quickly now. I was the arrowhead again, serrated and sharp. Next to me, nonlineardynamics appeared as a golden suggestion of a swallowtail butterfly made entirely of looping whorls of thread.

We moved much faster than I had when I was running HQ. The defenses looked the way they had when Gloss and I had first started our run: fuzzy and fractal, misty, unaware.

This time, as we approached the first layer, which I knew to be a Starbuck, the ice stayed dormant. The labyrinth never coalesced, and I could only see the faint grooves of the pathways through it in the mist. The walls themselves were insubstantial and let me through without consuming any of my resources.

Likewise the second ice remained inactive. Gloss’s gamble had been justified.

By the time that Linney and I were through the second ice, I felt much more confident about the run. I knew the innermost was a Ludo and was susceptible to the breaker than Linney had coded for me. It didn’t matter to me whether FUTUR Design rezzed it or not.

Now, this was the confidence of the independent thief. I liked it.

FUTUR Design left Ludo sleeping and we breezed into the center of the server. Then I saw her, approaching from the side of my vision.

It was Bell Wolf, doing the thing she had done last time. From my perspective, she grew larger and larger and the rest of the server seemed to recede into the distance. She was commanding more and more of my attention.

Unlike last time, I had plenty of resources. I felt my console draw power as I tried to pull away from her. She was continuing to grow in size but at a slower rate now, as if whatever was powering her had given up, slower and slower, until eventually she stopped growing within my vision and began to recede.

Then she was receding and suddenly I had broken free of her. I saw Linney’s butterfly approach Bell Wolf, and in a rush of current and data, Bell Wolf’s avatar broke into chunky, half-derezzed blocks of junk data.

What lay before us were the mysteries concealed by the server.

Gloss’s Encyclopedia of Ice

Name

Trade Name Unknown (Girl in Field)

Manufacturer

FUTUR Design

Cost to rez

Very low

Nguyen-Okafor complexity

2

Type

puzzle

Subtype

simulant; toll

Subroutines

takes money