Chapter 17. Special Offer
When Linney had taken a few deep breaths and I had ordered a cup of black coffee for her, she told me what was up.
“I can’t tell the others,” she said. She looked around as she said that.
We were in a coffee shop that was something between quiet and bustling, close to midnight. Most tables were occupied with students in groups working on what seemed to be math or chemistry or anatomy. Such unfamiliar lives.
Some tables held only single occupants, a brooding poet here, someone listening to headphones there. Toward the front, a couple of older men were playing chess and drinking espresso on a long bench.
The music and air circulators ran loud enough that we wouldn’t be overheard. Linney had pulled her hands into the sleeves of her high-tech rain jacket, its wrinkles like those of a piece of plain paper. She warmed her sleeves on the mug. Not making eye contact with me but staring into the deep brown the coffee, she said, “I’ve received an offer. It’s not for an internship, it’s for a real job. Not only that. For a career.”
Where I came from, careers belonged to people with enough money to send their kids to elite colleges, where they would become managers, lawyers, doctors, or maybe even executives. Those people expected to devote their lives to work, one corporation at a time. If you were chasing a career you never stopped working. You answered messages on a visual interface while changing diapers. You took meetings from the beach.
For the rest of us, there were jobs. You worked a job because you would be homeless if you didn’t. You worked because you needed to buy groceries and go to the doctor.
You didn’t expect your employer to be loyal to you and you sure weren’t loyal to it. Eventually you’d be laid off or maybe fired, and then you’d get another job. If you were lucky your wage would keep up with inflation. If you were really lucky, you’d be salaried and maybe get a raise that outpaced inflation once in a while. If you weren’t, you’d take a pay-cut and then half-ass it every day until you lost that job and the cycle began again.
Of course, being a runner, “job” had an entirely different meaning to me now, bringing to mind crash spaces, night sweats, and lethal data.
So to hear Linney—nonlineardynamics, for heaven’s sake—talk about a potential career, it was a little like hearing one of the hoodie-wearing skaters outside my hometown hydrogen station say he was going into investment banking.
“You can tell me,” I said. “I won’t talk about it to anyone else.”
“Restoration Consulting contacted me,” she said. “Do you know them?”
Seeing me shake my head, she continued. “They’re a 7Wonders subsidiary. They operate in former war zones, trying to build data and legal and monetary frameworks to rebuild nation-states. Or city-states. Or corporation-states, most recently. And they take a massive cut of whatever natural-resource wealth remains in that zone. They bring in profits that would make your eyes twitch, but they do bring stability to places around the world that need it. It’s proven that they shut down terrorists and narco traffickers. Tonight, I get a knock at my door. Not a message. Not even an email. Not a postal letter. But a woman in a black business suit, with these shiny, dark, super-straight bangs, at my door in the middle of the night, and she knows my net handle and wants to buy me a cup of coffee.”
“Sounds terrifying.”
“It was.”
“What did you do?”
“What would you do?” she said, suddenly appearing mischievous as the steam from the cup of coffee bathed her face.
I thought about it and looked around. The words COME SEE ME were still there, faintly, on my vision. They weren’t going away but they were dim enough to ignore—mostly. “Well,” I said, “I would figure that if they knew where I was physically and they knew my net handle, then I could consider myself tagged. So I wasn’t necessarily putting myself in any more danger by going with them.”
“I don’t know if I agree with that,” Linney said. “If the corps want to target you at home, they can. But they’ll have to deal with collateral damage, and that’s expensive. It means settlements for your neighbors, sometimes major settlements, particularly if someone else gets killed while they’re trying to flatline you. Corps live and breathe money. They don’t want to spend a single K more than they have to. If they can get you to leave your home, accompany them to a location that they control, they can dispose of you without any collateral. They might save themselves hundreds of thousands, maybe millions. So think about that and put yourself in my situation. What would you say?”
I leaned forward and offered Linney my hands. She took them and squeezed them. “I’d say,” I said, not actually knowing what I’d say, “I’d say that I needed to decide whether I felt like this stranger was trustworthy. I’d have to rely on instinct. And if my instinct said it was OK, I’d go with her.”
She squeezed my hands again and then pulled her hands back. She was actually smiling now. “You get it,” she said. “I knew you’d understand.”
She took a long sip of coffee and held her hands out, palms up. “Let me tell you the tale. I feel like I can trust this lady, so I grab my coat and bag and we take a walk. She doesn’t say anything in the elevator or on the street. I notice we are being followed by a drone and a large black van on the street. I turn to her, say, ‘Lose those things, or I’m walking.’ She makes a gesture. The drone flies off and the van stops.”
Linney paused for effect. I felt a chill. Then she continued.
“We find a chain coffee shop, a Cabin Coffee, you know, super brightly lit inside, all those lights on the warm wood paneling? Cozy. We get some coffees and sit in the overstuffed chairs in the corner by the electric fireplace. And she takes out this thing from her jacket. It’s shaped like a disc but grows into this foam cylinder. It’s an acoustic absorber, she says, to prevent anyone from overhearing us, even with a directional mic. Very cool. The physics are interesting. Anyway. She says that she’s a fan of my work both in school and on the net, and she lays out a bunch of things about me: true things, runs I’ve made on all the major corps, grades I’ve earned. And I’m scared, thinking that the cops are going to show up, that or corporate security, and I’m about to be moved to a black site. But then she says she wants to offer me an entry-level position in Restoration Consulting’s modeling and network security division.”
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“Like being a sysop?”
The expressions on her face changed. One moment she looked scared and the next elated. “She said it was nothing like that,” Linney said. “She said it would involve creating data networks in countries that needed them, to connect people in a secure and private way. The focus wouldn’t be on protecting corporate data but on allowing people to reach each other. She said it was good, honorable work, and it would pay better than anything I could find in the academic world. I’d be able to choose some of my own assignments, and even do some charity work if I wanted.”
“What did you say?”
“I said I’d have to think about it.”
I could tell why she didn’t want to mention this to any of the other runners. If she revealed she’d been tagged, let alone if they thought she was considering going to work for one of the corps, they wouldn’t trust her anymore. But at the same time, I could tell she was seriously considering it. Who wouldn’t? A corporate career made your life simpler. All you had to do was keep your employer happy, and you’d have enough money to own a condo, raise kids, take vacations once in a while. You wouldn’t have to worry about homelessness or running out of food. You could afford to go to the doctor. Everyone wanted those things. And to be offered such a life at the age of nineteen? Linney was very, very lucky, according to what most people would think.
“That’s heavy,” I said. “What do you think you’ll do?”
Then her mischievous look returned. “What I think, Rawls, is that I need to know more about what this company is really doing.”
“Oh.”
“And I need back-up.”
“Oh.”
She reached her hands across the table. “Can I count on you?”
I took her hands. The words COME FIND ME glowed, superimposed on her face. This woman before me was tagged. What I really needed to be doing was getting ready to make another attempt to find Freya.
But Linney was right here, and she needed my help, and if I was being completely honest, spending time with her was like a drug.
“I’m in,” I said.
She brushed a stray lock of hair out of her face. “I knew you’d be.”
“What do we do?”
“First thing’s first,” she said. “This run is going to be a little trickier than the last one we made.”
“Why?”
“Restoration Consulting is locked down, permanently, in a big building on the far southeastern edge of Carthage near the old nuclear facility in Southport. It does not have good relationships with other corps, and doesn’t even have the friendliest relationships with other subsidiaries of 7Wonders. All their most advanced servers can only be accessed from within their building. Which means we need to go there. Tonight. In meatspace.”
I leaned back and drummed my fingers on the table. I still got a little pain from the newly-installed sub-sub implants. I felt juiced.
“Let’s do it,” I said.
COME FIND ME
I shook my head. I’d do it for Linney, even if the words in my eye didn’t exactly go away anymore. I told myself that I wasn’t getting distracted from finding out what happened to Freya so there was no need to feel guilty. I wanted to believe that. Helping Linney was all part of preparing myself for the real work.
###
The Restoration Consulting building appeared bombproof. Located in the Southport nuclear remediation district, against the backdrop of artificial concrete barrier islands rising up in the distance with their ghostly, mournful lights, Restoration Consulting’s headquarters was a pair of tall, skinny right triangles joined by three elevated corridors and a number of thick scaffoldings.
In fact, for the immensity and durability projected by the nearly-windowless steel and fungal-crete building, it was ringed by a number of dark ironworks that appeared as if they had been there for years, as if the building were perpetually under construction, or under siege. It was the most frightening structure I had ever seen.
“You’re planning to go inside that thing,” I said to Linney as I stashed my laptop and console in a locker in the the BRUTE station. The metro didn’t reach this far to the southeast yet. My stuff secure, we trudged toward downtown with the other bus riders.
“Yeah, what’s the problem?” she said.
As we walked over the elevated metal walkway to the ring of scaffolding around the Restoration Consulting building, the sheer size of the towers took on an additional, intimidating quality: not only was it the tallest building around, it was so much taller than anything around it that its scale appeared to be distorted. When we first left the BRUTE, we seemed to be a fifteen-minute walk from the building. But fifteen minutes later, we still seemed to be a fifteen-minute walk away and the building was even taller.
“Couldn’t we just hire a freerunner to do this for us?” I said.
“They mostly don’t work for hire. They’re nuts. They’re like the meatspace version of the CheRRy, all of them.”
I suddenly felt jealous of Linney, and wondered who were the freerunners she knew.
“I don’t see a way in,” I said.
“How about the front door?”
“Won’t they know we’re here?”
“It’s OK,” she said, handing me a small envelope. I peeked inside to find a pair of contact lenses and a bottle of saline. “For getting through the retinal scan.”
A shiver of nervousness went through me. I wasn’t sure how these contacts would play with my cybernetic eyes. But this didn’t feel like the time to disclose that fear. I figured I’d deal with it if we got stopped at the front door.
“Are they going to let us through with your hardware?”
She stopped walking. “What are you, afraid?”
“Of course I am. You can’t bring your console in there.”
“No kidding,” Linney said. “I’ve got all the hardware we need in my head. And you’ve had some work done, too.”
She held out her hand. I took it. OK, I admit that I felt a bit more confident while touching her. But I promised myself that if this went sideways, I was getting her out of there. I wasn’t built for fighting in meatspace, never had been. Skinny kid, skinny teenager, built for running, not war. Not built for taking on corporate security officers outside the net.
Not yet, a voice said in my mind. All that is trainable, it said. I shook my head to clear it, and was rewarded with a weird look from Linney and the insistent words burned into my left eye:
COME FIND ME
“I’m OK,” I said.
She leaned in and I felt her breath against my ear as she whispered the details of our fake identities to me. It turned out that she had found a list of low-level workers starting temp contracts today at 7Wonders on a sketchy employment-agency site and paid a couple of the workers—a man and woman—not to show.
I slipped the contact lenses over my eyes and we mounted the ramp inside the tunnel made out of scaffolding. Ahead of us was a security station staffed by a man at a podium, and then a man and woman in armored vests, with chunky long guns pointed down, each one featuring four barrels in a single assembly, a blocky decal reading LESS LETHAL in red letters down the length.
Gloss’s Encyclopedia of Ice
Name
Resheph
Manufacturer
7Wonders
Cost to rez
Unknown
Nguyen-Okafor complexity
6
Type
Shooter
Subtype
Rigshooter
Subroutines
4: generates cash from runner activity; trashes multiple pieces of software, including icebreakers; stops the run