Chapter 2: Priority Run

“What did I just do?” I said. The camera drone that had been eyeing my companion lay silent in a heap under the table.

“Isn’t it obvious?” Hank Rio said. “You slipped through the drone’s rudimentary ice and you breached its processor.”

“Why was the drone looking at you?”

“I’m a popular guy,” he said. Then Rio took the glasses from me before I could ask any other questions and leaned forward again. He opened one metal hand, and this time the holo projection resolved.

In sharp detail I saw Freya, standing, wearing a tank top and jeans, looking at the camera with a neutral expression. This wasn’t Freya as a fourth-grader at the science fair or Freya in her senior portrait. It was Freya after she’d fallen ill. She was terribly thin, but the strength in her eyes was unmistakable. And the chemotherapy implant in her collarbone was new; I’d never seen it before.

“That’s impossible,” I said. “She was scrubbed.”

“Don’t make me repeat myself,” Rio said. But he didn’t sound hostile. He sounded as if he were toying with me.

“When the corps want something gone,” I said, “it goes away. They own the net. There are no rules—”

“No,” Rio said. The sharpness in his voice stopped me cold. “Lesson two: the net has rules like anything else. It’s code, after all, and code is a set of rules. The corps have to follow the rules, even if they were the ones who wrote them. But if you know what you’re doing, if you’re determined, and brave, and clever, and you keep an eye out ... ”

“What?” I said. I found myself leaning forward.”

“You can exploit the rules.”

“Can exploiting the rules help me find Freya?”

Rio tilted his hand, rotating the holo projection this way and that. “What do you think?” he said.

“I think I want to try.”

He closed his fist and holo-Freya vanished. With his other hand, equally chromed, he slapped down paper money for the server. I’d never seen paper money before.

Rio stood.

“Come on, young Rawls.” He buttoned his suit jacket. “You have much to learn.”

I struggled to follow Rio through the city. He was confident in his movements. He knew exactly how to cut through the after-work crowd as he ascended metal staircases and descended brick-paved ramps, moving us away from the center of downtown into a shabby-looking neighborhood strung with thick wires overhead, and noisy with a mixture of Nigerian pop coming from wearable speakers on passers-by and Latin rhythms from within storefronts lining the street.

I managed to keep Rio in sight, and when he stopped at the thick metal door of an anonymous three-story brick apartment building, I caught up to him. He smirked at me and opened the door using some complicated gesture that I didn’t catch.

When he shut the thing behind me, all the noise of the world went with it. We walked up a darkened stairway and then he opened a second, wooden door with an old-fashioned brass key.

“Why don’t you use your wrist?” I said.

He looked up at me as he swung the door wide. “Think about that for a second.”

“Not secure?”

Rio pursed his lips, as if impressed, and walked inside. “Gloss! Get down here! We have company.”

I saw that the apartment occupied two levels, having been built into an old industrial building the way the fancier places in my hometown were. An antique wrought-iron spiral staircase connected the bottom floor with a lofted space above. Long windows let in the last light of the afternoon. From above, I heard thumps as someone with serious heft was moving around.

Following Rio’s lead, I removed my shoes and stepped inside.

The cast iron staircase shook and I saw first a pair of legs and then the bulk of a very large man descend. While Rio was somewhat taller than me, this guy was enormous, jacked with muscle and covered in thick, geometric tattoos. His hair was cut sharp, slicked so that it stood up, with designs matching the tattoos shaved into the side. He wore workout clothes and looked sleepy.

“Gloss, I’d like you to meet Rawls. Dade referred him to us.”

“A pleasure,” Gloss said. When he spoke, his voice was so soft that I almost didn’t hear him. Gloss extended his thick, muscled hand, and I shook it, or rather, he shook mine. “May I offer you a beverage?”

“Get some water in this kid,” Rio said, taking off his suit jacket and hanging it in a closet. “He’ll need to hydrate. I didn’t even give him the chance to sip something at the cafe, and there’s no time now.”

“No time for what?” I said to Rio’s back as he moved deeper into the apartment, into a room, and shut the door behind himself.

“Looks like you piqued his interest,” Gloss said, and laid a heavy hand on my shoulder. “When the boss is interested, it’s best to move quick and look lively.”

“He’s your boss?”

“Well, I’m his intern,” he said, and turned back to the kitchen, set a tea kettle to boil, and then filled a glass with filtered water. He handed it over to me and I gulped it down. I hadn’t realized how thirsty I was after spending a few hours on the BRUTE and then hustling through downtown. Because I was so thirsty, the water tasted great, but I felt a moment of longing as I realized how different it tasted than the water from the mountain back home. Water at home was slightly sweet, almost floral. This had a distant, salty taste, maybe even something sour.

This content has been misappropriated from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.

“It’s safe,” Gloss said quietly, noticing my expression. “You don’t have to worry about trace psychedelics or industrial chemicals.” He opened a cabinet and showed me a stack of filters connected to a municipal water pipe. The water cascaded through thick dark rings of something that looked like stone, seven or eight of them, before dripping into the pitcher below.

Gloss shut the cabinet and turned his attention to the tea kettle, which was somehow already boiling. Humming to himself, he measured out the dried leaves. It was remarkable watching him work. I immediately liked him.

Rio came out of the room again, still in his bright white shirt and suit pants, carrying some electronic gear. The thing in his hand looked like a prototype game console or something, a rectangular metal box with rounded corners wired to a chunky headset that appeared to be like the early VR systems we read about in school. Except this one looked like it had been built to survive a cruise missile strike.

He dropped the gear on the couch and gestured at me.

I held out a hand. “Wait,” I said. “You still haven’t explained how you found that hologram of Freya when every search that Dade and I did showed that she’d been scrubbed.”

Rio smiled. “I didn’t find it. Gloss did. When you told me her name, I messaged him. Gloss, do you want to explain?”

Gloss turned to me with a steaming mug of tea in his hands. After taking a moment to breathe in the steam, at which Rio rolled his eyes, Gloss said, “I found that image on an unprotected server run by a local nonprofit. The nonprofit provides support to people who are in the hospital but don’t have family around to visit them.”

His mention of not having anyone around to visit made my chest ache. When Freya had gone away for the clinical trial, I remembered visiting her in the hospital in Asheville once, and telling her I would be back in a few days. But the next day, I received a message from her saying she had to go to Carthage and didn’t know when she would be back. It hurt to think of her, here, alone.

“So you broke into the server?” I said.

“Well, yeah. It’s what we do.”

Rio chuckled at that. “And if you want to find out what’s happened to her, kid, you’ll have to do it, too.” He held up the ancient, disaster-proof VR headset.

“You mean now?”

“The learning curve is steep,” Rio said. “And you don’t know how much time you have.”

“Stop scaring him, Enrique, he’s just a kid.”

Rio—or Enrique—shrugged.

“Did he just call you ‘Enrique’?” I said.

“He did. Because that’s my name. Enrique Lima, the greatest thief in the world, in the flesh and in the steel.” He mimed tipping a hat that he wasn’t wearing.

“So Hank Rio isn’t your real name?”

“Do you think I’d give my real name to some kid I don’t know who messaged me allegedly on Dade’s recommendation?”

I could guess the answer to that. I thought about it for a moment. “Is Enrique Lima your real name?”

Both Enrique and Gloss laughed, long and loud and deep. “I think he gets it,” Gloss said.

“Come on, kid, time to make your first run.” He patted the cushion of the couch. “Get comfortable. This could take some time.”

I worked myself into what felt like a cozy position on the couch, my legs stretched out and a throw pillow at the small of my back. Enrique set the console in my lap and handed me the headset.

“Is this illegal?” I said.

“Sure,” Enrique said. Gloss just sipped his tea. He’d gone back to looking sleepy.

“Am I going to get in trouble?”

Enrique looked over at Gloss. “Is he going to get in trouble?” Enrique rumbled.

“Only if he gets caught,” Gloss said, sounding bored.

“Where am I going?” I said.

“This is a minimally-protected remote server operated by FUTUR Design,” Enrique said. “They’re a company that makes simulated humans. It’s generally safe to make a run on them as long as you’re well-rested. They generally don’t make reprisals for low-impact runs.”

“What am I trying to do?”

“You’ll figure it out. I’ll point you in the right direction. You do what feels natural.”

“Are you sure?”

“Listen. Dade thinks you have potential. And I saw what you did to that camera drone in the cafe. You got this.”

Feeling both confident and nervous, I lifted the metal headset and brought it down over my eyes. At first the hard edges were uncomfortable, but then I noticed that there were inner rubber rings that fit over my eyes. They were aged, and brittle, but they felt better than bare steel. The headset smelled of sweat and incense and hair product. I pulled a stretchy band over the back of my head and rested against the pillow so that my neck didn’t have to take the weight of the thing.

“Ready?” Enrique’s voice said. It sounded far away.

“Yeah.”

For a moment, nothing happened.

Then I felt like I was driving on a highway at night, a small lit-up city in the distance, except there was no highway, no car, no trees. Just me, moving toward the small city at a speed that felt terrifying and exciting all at once. I didn’t have a body, not exactly, but I was something, some figure, some shape, like a sharp wedge.

It felt good. Like every school kid, I’d used the net before for homework or to message friends at night. Sometimes I watched videos Dad didn’t want me to watch. I’d played some VR games on the rare occasions Freya and I were able to sneak into the VRcade downtown. But this was something different. It felt total. It felt like I belonged here.

The city drew nearer, or rather I came closer to it. Pillars of light rose before me. Something in me longed to be inside those pillars, to see what they were made of, how they worked. Suddenly I wanted to know everything about this place, at once so much simpler and more complex than the real world.

Then I slammed into a wall. I was sure it hadn’t been there before. Yeah, I had noticed something fuzzy and indistinct ringing the base of the city, but I had taken that to be the ambient glow of the skyscrapers of data.

Now, right in front of the nose of my sharp, wedge-like form, was a wall made of millions of tiny, clear cubes. It was as hard as anything in the real world, and as painful to smack into at high speed. I tried to rise above the wall but couldn’t. The cubes didn’t move when I tapped on them. I tried hitting them harder and harder. Eventually, it felt like the cubes were about to budge.

But when I took a closer look, I saw the cubes had not moved at all. There was something interesting about them. They had not been installed uniformly. The gaps between them varied in size as if they had been stacked by hand.

“You can’t come in.” The tiny, child-like voice came from behind the wall. Through the clear blocks, I could see that there was someone was out there. I moved along the wall, looking for a larger gap, and noticed that whoever was there was tracking my movement and moving along with me.

“I’m not allowed to let you in,” the voice said again.

After a while I came to a place where the wall had been either damaged or left unfinished. It had partially collapsed at the top, and cubes hung scattered in three-dimensional space. The hole may have been big enough for me to move through. As I accelerated toward the gap, I saw the figure behind the wall spring forward and start to grab cubes from the space around the hole. He was just a child, maybe seven years old, but he worked quickly and precisely, filling the hole with cubes at a frightening pace until the wall was solid again.

“You’re not supposed to be here,” he said.

“I’m just looking around.”

“I’m going to call my mom,” he said, “and then you’ll be sorry.”

Gloss’s Encyclopedia of Ice Name Login-prompt Manufacturer Everyone and their grandmother Cost to rez Virtually nothing Nguyen-Okafor complexity 0 (maybe less) Type Platform Subtype None Subroutines Stops a Run. Trivial for a runner to pass.