Chapter 15: Pocket of Humanity

Linney and I dove into the center of the server, immersing ourselves in data about marketing, sales, testing, proposed simulants, voices and static, human models, names, numbers flitting by, scandals, witness depositions, confidential settlements, three-dimensional matrices, my own childhood memories in there somewhere, but in a distorted perspective, as if I were looking at myself lying by the riverbank through another’s eyes, everything brighter and brighter and louder and louder.

Then I jacked out into the townhouse again, in the bright heat of mid-afternoon, breathing hard as if I’d run a fast mile, the climate control struggling, the overhead fan whipping around quickly. By the time I was fully back in meatspace, I could hear Linney showering behind the closed door of the bathroom. I toweled off again, the towel soaked with my sweat.

I made a mental note to hydrate. My body, the meat, felt more like a piece of hardware to be repaired than it had before I jacked in.

Buttoning my shirt, I came downstairs to find Gloss and Wren in conversation at the kitchen table. “Congrats, man,” Gloss said. “With what we’ve got, we’re all set.” He turned his laptop around to show me. Apparently, the buyer had already accepted the data and paid up.

Over the last few runs, I’d spent every last dollar in my account. Now I looked at my wrist. My account held another thirty-three thousand. That was more money than my father had ever made in a year.

“What’s next?” I said. “Another run?”

Laughter from Wren and Gloss “No, little bro,” Gloss said. “Now we feast.”

###

Among the old tobacco factories in the Winston district, Wren and I found a small co-op grocery store that we could walk to from the townhouse. It was the kind of place operated and patronized by kind, old people, men with gray ponytails, women with shock-white buzz cuts, enbies favoring silvery, flowing tresses or short, gelled helmets of mercurial hair.

Wren and I, only by the fact that we were young, were completely out of place here. When I volunteered to go grocery shopping, I had hoped that it would be Linney who came with me, but she wanted to make some modifications to my breaker after seeing it in action. So Wren came with.

She was older than me, and taller and stronger. I liked her immediately and could see why Gloss did, too. She carried herself with the air of someone who could never be offended, who took in all of human experience as a curiosity. I guess it helped to have a thick skin when you didn’t present the way a woman nicknamed “Wren” may have been expected to present: tiny, flitting.

She told me she’d only been running for a couple of months. It beat working as a writer for nonprofits. She felt like she was making a difference now, politically.

Gloss had given us a list and we were working through it, searching out galanga and garlic and chiles. I grabbed some oranges, each one covered in a paper wrapper printed in bold type that said: “This contract limits our liability. Read it carefully.”

The hardest thing on the list to find was a specific kind of fragrant rice, but someone at the co-op was able to locate it for us. We each carried a basket and I found the trip totally enjoyable.

“Do you cook?” I asked Wren.

“No time,” she said. “I mostly eat out.”

“Can you afford that?”

She gave me a look. After a moment, I understood. Whenever her bank balance dipped, she made a run for some fast cash.

“You don’t strike me as someone after money in the way that Enrique Lima is,” I said.

“That guy? Hooo, I’m not sure there will ever be enough for him,” she said. “But you’re right. I don’t care about money beyond paying my rent and buying chili noodles around the corner.”

I looked her over. Her clothes were secondhand and her haircut was not expensive. I could believe what she said.

“So why do you run?” I said.

“For the same reason that a lot of us do: to see what the corps would rather keep hidden.”

“You want to expose them?” I said. We were among the beer now, and Wren was pulling down a couple of six-packs one by one to hand to me.

“Depends,” she said. “I’m not always ideological, not like CheRRy or Ohm or Kent. I don’t particularly care if the juicy corporate secrets get streamed on Panopt or one of the smaller feeds. In fact, I don’t think that there’s any good or realistic alternative to the way things are. I just want to do my part for working people. If I can make the public aware that a group of folks are getting a raw deal, I’ll do it.”

“What’s the weirdest thing you’ve ever seen on the net?”

“You wouldn’t believe me if I told you.”

“Try me.”

She looked at me, there under the simulated daylight bulbs in the beer aisle. “Some of the things I’ve experienced, you’re not ready for. But I’ll tell you about one thing. There’s a place on the net where you can dream with others, share your dreams, see theirs. I’ve only found it once, it was difficult, it moves around, but it was worth it.”

“Wow.”

She smiled, and picked up both her and my baskets, leaving me with the beer as we moved to the front of the store. This was the kind of place with old-fashioned check-out machines staffed by actual people.

On a vinyl banner stretching across the front of the store, were printed the words, “Good work is good for you!” It was a nice sentiment.

“What about Gloss?” I said. “He runs because it’s part of his scholarly work, right?”

“That’s what he says, anyway.” Wren worked with me to unload the baskets.

“Do you take cash?” I asked the woman at the register.

“Of course, young man,” she said. “The unbanked need to eat, too.”

I peeled off some bills that Gloss had given me—a fair amount over the total—and handed it to her. “Next time someone comes in and needs something, make sure they get it.”

“Thank you,” she said neutrally and put the bills in the till. I had felt like I was doing some good, that I was being unusually generous, but maybe this was how things worked here. Maybe people here paid for each other’s groceries and looked out for those who weren’t connected to the net by credit chips.

Did you know this story is from Royal Road? Read the official version for free and support the author.

On the way back to the townhouse, walking on a street among families with young children and neighbors rocking on their porches, I brought up what she had said. “So Gloss says that his running is related to his scholarship?”

“His scholarship supports his running,” Wren said, a smirk on her lips, visible even on the dark street. There were few streetlights, and everything was quiet, but it felt like all these people were looking out for each other. And there wasn’t a garish corporate logo in sight. We had stumbled onto a strange pocket of humanity, and it felt meaningful to me.

“So I guess we’ll see what happens when he finishes his dissertation,” I said.

“That’s exactly right. Will he become a professor or a full-time data hijacker?”

“Or some kind of hybrid?”

She shrugged. “Who knows? He’s a wonderful man,” she said.

“He thinks highly of you as well,” I added as we climbed the steps to the townhouse.

“Is that so?” Wren spoke softly. It sounded like she was genuinely touched.

###

Over a table full of spicy, stir-fried vegetables and papaya salad and perfectly-done rice, the talk turned to sysops.

“What happened to Bell Wolf back there?” I asked Linney, who had caused the FUTUR Design sysop’s avatar to derez and scatter in the net.

“I terminated her connection to the net and erased her login credentials,” Linney said. “Once you’re in the root of a server, it’s easy to do if you can pay for the processing and electricity.”

“And you can do more, besides,” Gloss added.

“Like what?” I said between forkfuls of delicious broccoli, peppers, and rice.

“You can find out all sorts of things about the sysops,” Gloss said, passing a dish with his powerful hands. “You can dig up embarrassing photos or the personal difficulties they hide from those they work with. The clues to those things are always hidden in their workspaces, and when you’re breaching a server they’re easy to find if you have the right programs running. Then you can cause trouble for them, at least enough to keep them out of your face while you complete the run.”

“But aren’t the sysops working people?”

An uncomfortable silence descended on the table.

“It’s true,” Wren said, “they are. But they’ve chosen to use their talents to protect the corps. There are very few of us who are above causing them a little difficulty to make our work possible.”

Linney looked uncomfortable. “Last night, Rawls, all I did was mess up Bell Wolf’s connection and login. I didn’t go looking through her photos. I didn’t embarrass her. I’m sure she’s back at work today.”

I reached out a hand to her. “Hey, I didn’t mean to suggest that you did anything wrong. I’m just trying to understand.”

“Linney’s right,” Gloss said. “And you’re right, too, Rawls. You have to be careful if you don’t want to mess up someone’s life. Sysops are ordinary people, closer to runners than most others, except for who they serve. They are some of the only other people to understand the visceral experience of the net.”

That made me wonder about something. “The experience of letting data stream through us for later sale and analysis: could it ever be harmful?”

No one said anything for a while. Linney made a sound that was halfway between a gasp and a sob.

Eventually, Wren said, “Yes. Sometimes.”

But no one elaborated. It sounded like they had some personal experience with it that made the question hurtful.

Later, when Linney and I were washing dishes in the big steel sink, I asked her what she thought of my breaker. She made a gesture, and a holographic projection opened on the backsplash, seemingly coming from something perched on her shoulder. It showed:

Name Hungry Creek 1.1 Type Icebreaker Matching subtype Platform Base Nguyen-Okafor complexity 2 Cost to boost 1K for 1 complexity Cost to break 2K for 2 subroutines

“I’ve tuned it up so that it runs more efficiently against some ice,” she said, “but you should still supplement it with another breaker soon, because this one can’t break shooter or puzzle ice, both of which can be dangerous.”

“Like the Starbuck?”

“That’s right,” she said. “You can’t break one of those with this.”

“Thanks,” I said. “Could I buy a breaker from that Gerty?”

“You can, if you plan ahead. She delivers but on her own time. Just leave a message for her at Mr. Grid’s. The breakers she sells aren’t cheap.”

“Thanks again.”

“Any time.” She dried her hands on a dish towel and then tossed it to me.

Then she walked upstairs. I had hoped to spend more time with her but I was getting used to her vanishing.

###

In the morning, after hugging Wren and Linney goodbye, Gloss and I took the BRUTE back to Optimist Park. Reclining in the leatherette seat, I watched the landscape move by at gotta-go-fast speeds: patchy farms, inter-urban wastelands, gleaming white suburban residential parks, and blocky arcologies in the distance like cubes made of colored crystal, as mysterious as they were attractive. For a while, the thin, fungalcrete strip of the Private Highway paralleled the BRUTE, hosting the comparatively tiny sedans and limos of the elite. As we neared the center city, the Private Highway rose up, up, and out of sight, only its super-tall pylons in view, lights blinking even in daylight.

“Word from the boss is that you’ve got the day off,” Gloss said as we neared the station. “What are you going to do with it?”

“I wanted to get another workup from the doctor,” I said, “and think about some new implants. Linney thought I upgraded my breaker, but I don’t know much about coding, so I thought I’d look at it.”

“All that sounds like work,” Gloss said. “And that’s fine, but make sure to take some time for yourself, too. We don’t want a bright star like you to burn out, at least not too soon.”

“Ideally I wouldn’t burn out at all.”

Gloss was quiet. After a moment, he said, “We all burn out. Some of us are lucky enough to go on our own terms, others get brought down.”

His expression and the way his voice sounded reminded me of the moment last night at dinner when I asked about harmful data.

“Did something happen?” I said. Then, realizing that Gloss couldn’t read my mind, I added. “Did someone you know access some harmful data?”

He looked at me as if he were frightened. “Yeah,” he said. “How’d you know?”

“It was just a sense,” I said.

“Linney’s ex,” Gloss said. The mention of someone who was once in that relationship to Linney sent a wave of jealousy through me.

Gloss continued. “He was deep into White Tree’s research and development server. The guy was an outcast, and that’s coming from an outcast who lives among outcasts. He was a tweaker, not to put it too delicately, and he was looking for research chemicals to use for his next high. Formularies, sibling pharma, hallucinogen precursors, spirituality at the molecular level. He’d set up the run for weeks, poking around, assembling a badass rig, staying up all night, staying straight for once, showing more determination and focus than I had ever thought possible for this guy. Then, late one night, he’d been up for days, and he made a deep dig into White Tree R&D. The run was chem-assisted, and he was wired and tired, and then—”

Gloss smacked his hands together with enough friction and shearing force that half the BRUTE’s passengers turned their heads. He looked around, sheepishly, then lowered his voice.

“—ran right into a snare. See, sometimes the corps keep assets in their servers that are meant for runners to find. They’re traps. Sometimes the traps trace their location—you’d expect that out of 7Wonders or Panopt. But with White Tree the real danger is lethal feedback. When runners don’t know exactly what they’re looking for, when they’re digging around looking for anything at all, the danger is they faceplant into one of those and flatline.”

“He died?”

“Linney found him on the mattress in his crash space, no pulse, no respiration. He’d been dead for hours. Promise me, little bro, that you’ll never run White Tree if you’re tired. No matter what.”

Enrique had said the same thing. “I promise,” I said.

“Not even if you think it’s the only way to find her,” Gloss said.

His eyes were fierce. Ice and icebreakers, running and breaching, it had all been exhilarating. But this didn’t feel like a game anymore.

The CheRRy’s Guide to the Hardware Store

Name

DNA Scrambler

Manufacturer

Oji-Cree Biodynamics

Legal status

Illegal except in Sovereign Indigenous Nations

Description

Complex molecules that remain suspended in bloodstream

Cost

a few K every few months

Function

Prevents digital routines from peeking at your DNA via your net port, used to confound some particularly nasty White Tree reprisal protocols