Chapter 18: Less Lethal

As Linney and I made our way into Restoration Consulting, workers in faded clothing stood in front of a retinal scanner and were waved through by an unarmed officer behind a podium. As we neared him, he looked at us and motioned us forward. I could have sworn I saw one of the armed guards on either side of him twitch.

“Haven’t seen you before. New hires?” said the man at the podium next to the retinal scanner, which was a tall, spidery robot sweeping its near-invisible beam over us this way and that. The color of the beam was the kind of dim red that most people couldn’t see. I could, by virtue of my strange eye implants.

“Yessir,” I said, my country accent returning on demand. All my life, I had found that it helped to be a little country in situations like this.

“Know where you’re going?” the man said.

“Yessir.”

The beam of the retinal scanner paused on Linney, and the man looked down at the screen on his podium, a screen I couldn’t see.

“Welcome, Ms. Chao,” he said to her. She smiled and waved her through. She kept walking, as if she were not going to wait for me.

The beam of the retinal scanner found my left eye, momentarily blotting out the purple words that followed me around everywhere now—COME FIND ME—and I flinched from the beam because I was able to see it.

The man at the podium chuckled. One of the armed guards choked up on the grip of her long firearm, marked with that less-than-encouraging phrase in slanted, bold type: LESS LETHAL. “No need to flinch, hoss,” she said. “Beam’s invisible.”

The man at the podium glanced at his screen. “Looks like we didn’t get a good read. How about you try that again?”

I looked directly at the retinal scanner and willed my neck not to move and forced my lids to stay open as much as I could while the dim red beam danced about my eyeballs.

“What a pretty picture,” the man at the podium said, though he didn’t sound like he really believed a word of it. He snapped his fingers and a third armed guard appeared behind him, wider and taller than the others and bulky with body armor. “Escort him,” the man at the podium said.

The armed guard stepped aside to let me pass and immediately fell in behind me. As I started walking down the towering, polished concrete atrium, the rubberized sound of boots echoing behind me, the man at the podium called out, “Have a good first day, Mr. Walker!”

Separating from Linney was not the plan. I could see her up ahead, where she’d stopped against the wall to wait for me. Now, with a guard following me, there was no way I could help her access the building’s network.

I had to lose this guy somehow. Once he figured out that I had no idea where I was going, I was going to be facing down the quadruple barrel of the mammoth firearm he was holding.

Linney watched as we passed but she made no move. As much as I wanted her help right now, I recognized that this was what she had to do. There was no sense in putting both of us in jeopardy. If they took me down, I had to trust that she would come for me once she’d accomplished her task. All this to check up on a job offer? It was starting to seem like a bad deal.

A voice in my head said, yeah, but what wouldn’t you do to spend another few hours with Linney?

I had to smile at that. My shoulder still felt warm and tingly from where she had leaned against me on the hour-long BRUTE ride down from the city center.

Thinking about the whispered briefing that Linney had given me a few minutes before we entered, I stopped and turned around. “Excuse me,” I said to the guard, who stopped up short, eyes hidden behind shades, “I’m supposed to work the incinerator. But I can’t remember where it is.”

“Second sub-basement,” the guard said.

“Thanks,” I said. “I got it from here.”

“You sure?” the guard said. He reminded me of these smug kids in middle school, the types who never asked me a question that they didn’t already know the answer to.

“Yeah.”

The guard just laughed and stepped closer to me. “Keep moving, sir. I’ll be right behind you.”

I turned around and started walking toward the large stairway leading down. The enormous atrium was dim, letting in daylight through long, thin slits that reminded me of the things in medieval castles meant for archers. On the other side of the atrium, in gaps between the panels of the walls, a molten stream of data flowed. It reminded me of the center of FUTUR Design's HQ.

The stairs turned at right angles every eight steps or so, creating a squarish spiral descending into levels of the building that glowed with infernal heat. Guess that would be the heating system in the winter, a byproduct of the movement of data. I loved things like that. The thought surprised me.

As we started to walk down the stairs, I made a quick inventory of my new cybernetics: fabricytes, FLUX chip, Vista Processor, sub-subs.

The fabricytes could keep me alive when my body wanted to die, the FLUX chip could help the software I was running from being wiped by corp systems, the Vista Processor was meant to help me access more data before a connection was terminated, and the sub-subs gave my fingers a mind of their own when it came to coding or picking locks. And of course there were my expensive cybernetic eyes. Could any of this help me?

Maybe if I were more clever, I would be able to find a use for these tools. Maybe if I had access to the net I could download a new script to my sub-subs, something to help me get that monstrous LESS LETHAL implement away from the man behind me. Supposedly my eyes could connect to the net, but I wasn’t yet sure how.

Stolen content alert: this content belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences.

I was almost out of ideas. Almost.

It was fitting. This guy reminded me of being bullied in middle school, so I decided to adopt middle-school tactics.

We were descending the second flight of polished concrete stairs, this armored dude just one step behind me, crowding me, not letting me get ahead. Clearly he was hoping I would mess up so he could have an excuse to inflict pain.

I picked up the pace and so did he. He didn’t give me an inch as I hopped down the stairs to the next landing and turned crisply to the top of the third flight of steps. He was so close I could practically feel the armored knuckles of his gloves pressing into my spine. Both of us were moving at a pretty good speed now.

But he was much heavier than I was.

I leaned to the side as if to tie my shoe, extending my left leg and making my center of gravity as low as it could go. The guard went over my outstretched leg, dropping his LESS LETHAL weapon with an awful clatter, and rolling down the entire flight of stairs—bam bam BAM bam—to the bottom, where other workers were crowding around him, kneeling next to him. Another guard was jogging forward to secure the firearm. The guard looked to be embarrassed and in pain.

More importantly, no one was looking in my direction. I jogged back up the stairs until I was back in the atrium. Suddenly Linney appeared at my side and we walked down a side hallway, almost totally unlit except for some giant, cast-bronze bowls hanging from the ceiling by chains and flickering with digital flames. On the far wall was a carving of some ancient god, not Greek or Roman, but some kind of Near Eastern Bronze Age archer thing.

In the darkness of the hallway, we walked quickly, as if we knew exactly where we needed to be. In fact, Linney walked slightly ahead of me and I followed her.

As the hallway turned, she cut in front of me and knelt before a rectangular bronze panel. As I knelt next to her, I saw that she had somehow found an unsecured port in the wall.

She wasted no time unzipping her long raincoat and extending a pair of cables from it, then twisting them together in a splitter and attaching the joined cables to the wall. She lifted her shirt and jacked in, and I pulled up mine and jacked in a moment later.

Just before netspace hit, she said, “Don’t worry, I’m monitoring our local grid.”

As she turned to face the wall, I could see, in dim red and bright purple on the back of her head, eight eyes like a spider under her short hair.

Then we were under, deep in Restoration Consulting’s local net. The ice hit us right away.

I didn’t have the typical feeling of cruising on a midnight highway, a neon city rising in the distance. Instead, I felt trapped in an emerald maze from the moment that meatspace burned and dissolved like a brain-wrapped film in the old-fashioned cinema back home.

Linney moved next to me, in tandem with me, her movements my movements, her feelings my feelings. She steered us through the maze. Our conjoined avatars, hers a whorled chaos butterfly and mine an arrowhead, made fast turns. Faster than I ever could on my own.

I had so much to learn about running. As good as I thought I was, Linney, who was the same age as me, was more than twice as fluent at navigating this new kind of space.

We twisted through the labyrinth, the sense that we were finding our way to its center growing stronger and stronger. Overhead, I could see a sweeping cone of light, not like a tight, World War II-era searchlight but like the overwhelming light of a religious vision. The light was so bright overhead that it momentarily seemed to make the maze transparent before it returned to darkness.

One thing was certain, that light above was hunting for us. Linney took us through the turns faster and faster. The way she turned in the net, it was not like a bus or a car making a turn. There was no arc. She changed direction instantaneously.

It was a method of navigating the net I had never experienced before. And at first it seemed like we were getting away from the light overhead. But then I noticed that the walls of the labyrinth around us were slowly brightening with diffuse light as the the flood of luminous energy overhead came nearer. It seemed to know where we were and was nearing us.

I felt something in Linney’s butterfly wings spin up and soon we were smashing through the walls of the labyrinth instead of navigating around them. I could practically feel the vibrations in my teeth as Linney’s icebreaker took us through like a wrecking ball.

That caught the attention of the light. It swept a solid cone of light onto us. There was no way of getting away from it now.

As we found our way to the center of the labyrinth, I saw a great well opening up below us, and Linney took us down, down, down, into the well.

My teeth were shaking so hard it was like having a cavity drilled. I felt like I’d been smacked in the face with a piece of riveted sheet metal.

But we were in. Away from the maze.

The server, not a city but a cube, dense with blocky data, was there underneath us. But just behind us, that hideous light was bearing down, brightening the corners of the cube, until suddenly we were caught in it.

I could feel this awful drag on our processes, everything slowing down. Suddenly Linney’s icebreaker changed shape, became less like a wrecking ball and more like a dust storm, and blotted out the light, concealing us from it.

“Quickly,” her voice said.

I turned to the cube below—or perhaps in front—of us. While the cube felt impenetrable at first glance, my Vista Processor was waking up, sending excited signals through my body like a double shot of good espresso, drawing my robot eyes this way and that, until I had found a fissure in the wall of the cube that let me in.

The experience of accessing all the data inside the cube with the Vista processor installed was nothing short of overwhelming. I had the feeling of being inside a vehicle that was traveling faster and faster, and I wished that the driver would just slow down. It didn’t feel safe. Gloss’s story about the trap that had flatlined Linney’s ex floated somewhere on the edge of my consciousness.

But it was too late for slowing down. I was here for everything. All the data in the cube passed through me. I could see the data on Linney, her job offer, the salary. It was the kind of salary people build their lives around.

I saw other things, too. I saw a massive hydrogen-electrolysis plant in Accra. I saw satellite projects slated for other cities in central Africa. I saw eastern European de-confliction zones, entire populaces controlled with compulsory neural implants. I saw a new constitution in Myanmar written entirely by Restoration Consulting’s lawyers. I saw those same lawyers on surveillance cam participating in an orgy in a Detroit hotel. Back-up in case they breached their confidentiality duties. We copied it all into the expanded storage built into Linney’s brain.

Then I was aware of the meat again, flat on my face on the polished concrete floor of the headquarters building, next to the bronze net port. I hurt all over. My nose felt like it had been broken. My leg cramped when I stretched it.

I felt worse than when I’d skidded against that razor membrane in Enrique’s apartment on my first ill-fated solo run. I wanted to vomit. The only thing that was somewhat reassuring was the slow violet pulse of COME FIND ME in my left eye.

I rolled onto my back and looked up at Linney, who was awake, too, sitting slumped against the bronze panel, a dark ring of dried blood crusting the edge of one nostril, a puffy black eye beginning to form above it.

With shaking fingers, she untwisted the net port.

“What the hell happened?” I managed to say.

Gloss’s Encyclopedia of Ice

Name

Light of Truth

Manufacturer

7Wonders

Cost to rez

medium

Nguyen-Okafor complexity

3

Type

Shooter

Subtype

Tagger

Subroutines

3: generates cash from runner activity; drains runner cash; tags the runner