Chapter 20: Neural Static

Linney lay unconscious before me, her eyes open but glazed over like dead screens, her nose bleeding. On instinct, I grabbed a cloth, wetted it with cold water, and wiped the blood from her nose. But the blood was still coming.

I took hold of her shoulder, nudged her. She didn’t respond. I nudged her again, but harder. Nothing.

I looked at her console on the floor. The net port in her chest remained plugged into it, and the console itself was plugged into the port in the wall. I left her plugged in, but disconnected the console from the wall. The green telltale faded.

“Hey,” I said, and brushed her hair from her head. No movement.

I didn’t know what to do. Would she want me to call the medics? That’s what I would do if she had overdosed. We had that drilled into us as kids. Find naloxone. Call for an ambulance.

But she might get in trouble if the medics found her in the middle of the run. What if they called the cops or corporate security? What if the medics WERE corporate security?

I hesitated for a moment. I knew she wanted to keep her problems concealed from the rest of the crew. But I couldn’t just let her die.

I called Gloss from the phone installed on Linney’s counter.

“Hello?” he said sleepily.

“I need help.”

“Wait—Rawls?”

“I woke up and found Linney jacked in. She’s not moving.”

Gloss’s voice snapped to wakefulness. “Have you done anything?”

“I unplugged the console from the wall.”

“And?”

“I thought that would work.”

“If there’s a switch wired into the cable, if you get there early enough, yeah. But it sounds like you’re too late.”

“Jacking out doesn’t help her?”

“Whatever loop she’s stuck in, it won’t stop just because the console isn’t on the net anymore. The corp software is running on her hardware, get it?”

“I think so.”

“Plug her back in, then you’ll have to jack in in tandem. Remember when you and I did that?”

“Yeah.”

“Just be careful. Whatever has her is going to come for you the moment you jack in. I’ll be there as soon as I can.”

“Thanks,” I said. Crossing her apartment in a single stride, I dug under our jackets and found my console. On my way back to her, I was already twisting the cable head into my net port.

I knelt next to her again, connected my console to hers, and—

smashed face-first into the emerald labyrinth we had broken earlier in the day. The walls were spiny and I could feel them pressing into my skin, not my avatar, my skin, threatening to break it. It took a minute to orient myself. We were jacked into a Restoration Consulting server and dealing with their augmented, Hardened Labyrinth. How was that possible? Then it hit me.

She’d installed a backdoor.

I started to move my avatar through the labyrinth. The devastation was obvious. She’d been through here with a wrecking ball. I moved through the holes she had left in the maze-like ice. Suspended above was the dull, gray disc of the previously-ultrabright Light of Truth. She’d broken that one, too.

What had grabbed her?

Then I saw Linney, deep in the well beneath the maze, her butterfly caught by bright tendrils of data, immobilized.

As I lowered myself to the place where she was bound, a tendril took notice of me and began moving my way. My icebreaker came to my side and rushed out in a torrent of power.

It passed right through the tendril, not interacting at all. Whatever it was, it wasn’t ice. This was part of the data in the server. It was some kind of trap.

As first one and then another tendril started wrapping themselves around me, I felt them hooking into the Vista processor, forcing me to go deeper into the server and enmesh myself in the data faster than I had intended to. If I didn’t find a way out, both of us were going to be caught here until Gloss made it over.

I could feel the FLUX chip in my neck start to vibrate. It was siphoning off some of the power coming through the tendrils, causing those around me, and the ones wrapped around Linney, too, to dim and flicker. I opened the connection to the FLUX chip wider, let more of the data through, let it grab onto the chip.

My console, too, was feeding off the biofeedback. I could taste blood in my mouth. My console liked the taste, turned it into juice.

I could feel the chip heating up inside my neck and vibing like a weird neck masssage. But the tendrils that had caught Linney had gone gray and her butterfly flapped free.

For a moment she and I hung suspended together, and then she blinked out of the server.

I hoped she was free, even though I was still caught. I looked closer at the tendrils, and suddenly I found my eyes drilling down to the surface of them and then to the micro-fractures along the surface, cracks and divots and crevasses and then canyons. I could see the individual bits that made up the tendrils and I could feel my fingers twitch, weirdly, not my avatar again but my physical body, and I could feel the sub-subs begin to rewrite the tendrils, to turn them in on themselves.

Suddenly they let me go and fell away, dim and uninterested. I felt myself rising back up, and then I was sitting, naked and huddled with Linney, in her apartment as the sun rose outside the window. Her face was buried in my armpit, leaving a faint smear of blood across my chest.

I brushed the hair from her forehead. “Want to tell me about that?” I said.

“I was going to scrub myself from the files. But they were waiting for me.”

“You made a run from home.”

Linney stood, her beautiful body shaky and clammy. She walked across her apartment, found a robe, and wrapped it around herself. Moving to the counter, she started a kettle of water boiling.

“Yeah, I know,” she said. She didn’t meet my eyes. “I’m tagged; I shouldn’t have done that. But last night was so good,” she said, and she looked up at me. I felt a bolt of current run through me. She continued. “And I didn’t want it to end. I don’t want to go away from my friends, from you. I got scared, and then acted impulsively.” She shrugged, as if it were not a big deal.

I wanted to raise my voice. I wanted her to know how scared I was. But then I thought: she’s the one who is scared. We remained in silence for a while. She poured cereal into bowls, added milk from the fridge. I didn’t know what to say.

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After a while, she spoke.

“They already knew where I lived. But I’m sure they know that it was me running on them tonight, and me installing the backdoor yesterday.”

“The question is: what will they do with that information?”

“Right. I’m sorry. I’ve put you in danger.”

“I was already in danger. At least we’re in danger together.” I stood and stood next to her in my boxer-briefs. She put an arm around me. “Listen,” I said. “Gloss is on his way. I didn’t know what else to do.”

“That’s OK,” she said. “I wasn’t going to be able to keep this a secret forever.”

Just then there was a knock at the front door. I threw on a t-shirt and jeans and answered it.

Gloss stood there, a look of concern on his face. “Is she OK? Are you OK?”

Her voice called out from within the apartment. “We’re both fine, Gloss. I’m going to have a shower. Come in and have some tea if you like.”

As the shower ran and Gloss sipped his tea, we looked at each other from across the kitchen counter. “What’s going on?” he said. He sounded creaky and underslept.

“Not my place to say.”

Gloss sipped his tea and nodded. “Should I ask her?”

“You could.”

“Everything OK?”

“I think so.”

“I’m going to tell you something, little bro. Divide and conquer is how the corps operate. They can’t beat all of us all of the time, so they try to turn us against each other.”

He looked at me as if he knew exactly what I was hiding. It struck me that this was the second time in a few days that I’d concealed something from Gloss—first, the run on Enrique’s equipment that ended quickly and bloodied me. Now, this. But he didn’t seem angry, or even disappointed.

I heard the water in the bathroom shut off.

“Linney,” I called through the door. “Do you want to talk with Gloss about anything?”

There was a pause. “Not right now,” Linney said.

Gloss stood and rinsed out his mug in the sink. “I’ll take that as my cue to leave. A bunch of us are going to Mr. Grid’s tonight. You two coming?”

“Sure!” came Linney’s voice.

Gloss tousled my hair on his way out the door.

After Linney had emerged and dressed, she combed her hair, saying as she did so, “What do you think? Should I tell them?”

“It’s up to you. But they’re going to find out eventually.” I remained on the couch, not quite looking at her. I wasn’t sure how much she was inviting me into her private life. Sure, we were intimate last night, and I knew some of her secrets and she knew some of mine. But somehow, watching her comb her hair while she wore only a towel felt inappropriate.

COME FIND ME flickered in my eye.

“I have some things to do,” she said. “Meet you at Mr. Grid’s tonight?”

“Sure.”

“What are you going to do with the day?” she said.

###

I went back to doing what I had been doing before Linney found me the other night—working on my breaker. Mindful of the fact that I was tinkering with a volatile piece of software that couldn’t easily be copied, I spent most of the day drinking coffee and trying to understand how it worked. I didn’t feel competent enough to make changes on my own.

I came to the work feeling deep anger at Restoration Consulting, and 7Wonders more generally, for intruding on Linney’s life. I meant emotional pain as well as physical. As much as I wanted to believe that everything I did was for Freya, at that moment I was motivated by the desire to punish 7Wonders.

It was only as the sun started to set outside the window of the coffee shop that my sub-subs woke up from their slumber and, linked with my net-capable eyes, began to make changes to the code.

I entered the beautiful state that some called flow. It felt appropriate, modding an icebreaker modeled on the Hungry Creek of my childhood. The flashing of the words in my eyes faded to a point at which I could ignore them. For a time, there was nowhere else I needed to be. I felt total relaxation wash over me, even as my fingers moved faster than I had thought they could. They struck the keyboard of the laptop with more force than necessary. The sound of my chromed-up fingertips striking the keys gave me a thrill, not quite the same as the thrill I got from touching Linney last night.

But not so different, either. Memories of pleasure broke my concentration long enough for me to realize that it was late. Time to get some food and make it to Mr. Grid’s to meet the rest of the crew.

A stray thought came to me as I closed my laptop and bussed my mug: how did my eyes and fingers know what to do? Did their knowledge come from me or somewhere else?

As I walked to the metro to catch the train for the far away neighborhood where Mr. Grid ran his bar, the summary of my upgraded icebreaker flickered across my vision in bright orange:

Name

Hungry Creek 1.2

Type

Icebreaker

Matching subtype

Platform

Base Nguyen-Okafor complexity

2

Cost to boost

1K for 1 complexity

Cost to break

1K for 1 subroutine

When I resumed the search for Freya, I would need something else to contend with the shooter and puzzle ice in White Tree’s servers, but at least Hungry Creek could smash through platform ice with the erosive power of water, the univeral solvent, the substance that had carved the canyons and glacial lakes.

I ran for the metro, eager to meet my friends.

###

As I walked down the steps to the basement bar, I heard laughter and conversation spilling out into the old, concrete stairwell. Where the fungalcrete floors of Restoration Consulting had been polished, smooth and flawless, the old concrete here was rough, pitted, and reinforced with old steel, dull and brown with age.

I pushed open the bar to find Gloss, Sunya, Ohm, and the CheRRy sitting together over beers, playing some ancient board game pulled from the rickety bookshelves on the wall of the bar. The cardboard playing surface and was warped and the wooden pieces had lost most of their paint, but the runners were concentrating deeply on the world of the game as if they weren’t some of the most notorious outlaws in North America.

I approached the bar. Mr. Grid served only two kinds of beer: light and dark, and I chose dark, the Tmave Pivo of his ancestral Czechia, and full of good feeling, brought the cool pint to my lips as I checked the high scores.

HI SCORES

NAME

SCORE

1

KT Thorn

1,378,435

2

Cynosure

1,301,783

3

EVE

1,224,999

4

The CheRRy

1,103,122

5

Sunya Xiong

993,807

6

Enrique Lima

910,639

7

Coilpath

895,620

8

Kent

894,012

9

Gloss

850,578

10

nonlineardyn

784,939

11

Ohm

726,500

491

Val43rie

101,642

3,009

Jasper Rawls

14,620

Of course, Linney’s score was not much changed because she hadn’t reported her runs to the scorekeeping system. But my runs were being logged. I hadn’t turned that function off. Maybe it was a mistake, even if it did give me a thrill to see my name roughly 2,000 places higher on the board. And I was curious about Val43rie. Whoever she was—I thought of Val43rie as a she—had jumped about 4,500 places up the rankings. She must have pulled down quite a score.

I set down the grubby tablet in its warped wooden frame and took my beer to the table. Sitting down not too delicately, bumping shoulders with the CheRRy and with Gloss, I lost myself in watching them play the game, my eyes catching at a glance that the CheRRy appeared to be winning but that Sunya Xiong was about to pull a move out of nowhere that would flip the entire board.

Just then I saw a flicker of light, and turned my head expecting Linney to enter and announce a decision—unless her decision was not to announce anything. I wanted her to be at peace, whatever she decided.

But it wasn’t Linney who came into the bar. It was Enrique, looking sharp in a cream suit. Enrique caught my eye instantly, and his head cocked, as if taking me in anew.

“Young son,” he said, “I hate to break up the party, but we have work to do.”

Gloss’s Encyclopedia of Ice

Name

Mood

Manufacturer

White Tree

Cost to rez

Very low

Nguyen-Okafor complexity

3

Type

puzzle

Subtype

red

Subroutines

4: bleeds runner; heals runner injuries; bleeds runner; reads runner neural patterns