Chapter 22: Dreamliner

“Get ready for a high-class ride,” Enrique said as we walked along the street toward the BRUTE station.

“We’re not going home?”

Enrique smiled, shook his head. “Not with what I have in mind.”

As we reached the bottom of the stairs up to the BRUTE, I started to mount the long stairs up to the towering station, which shuddered every few seconds as the two-level dreadnaught buses departed. I was in kind of a daze as I climbed, and it took me a moment to realize that Enrique and Gloss had not joined me.

“What are you doing up there?” Enrique called to me from the street. “I said a high-class ride. We’re not taking the BRUTE.”

“Thought you were joking.” Feeling somewhat embarrassed, I walked down the stairs again and rejoined them along the underside of the station, lit by stupidly white panels that were nevertheless yellowing at the corners and dimmed with piles of insect corpses inside.

We passed through temporary market stalls that catered to BRUTE commuters, selling everything from ready-to-eat meals in compostable paper trays to batteries to vials of silicone lube taped to porn encrypted on physical wafers that would disintegrate after a few hours, leaving one completely legal if the Talibama showed up. Not a problem in central Carthage, not yet, but in the outlying districts, even the denser ones, it was a possibility.

I still gawked at things like this but Enrique and Gloss just kept looking ahead. As we left the warm smells of the market behind, I saw that we were coming up to a windowless concrete building.

Before we made it there, a familiar beaten-up white van pulled alongside us. The rear doors opened as if automatically, and from the driver’s seat, a black woman with an island accent turned her head and spoke to us. “It all there,” she said.

“Thank you, Gerty,” Gloss said as he reached in to pull out first one and then a second pair of heavy cases. He handed two cases to me to carry. This was going to be a work out.

Gerty’s van pulled away.

Next a tall man with long, straight, shining black hair came out of the windowless concrete building.

“Jiibay, my man,” Enrique said, and shook hands with him.

“Boozhoo, Enrique,” Jiibay said. “And Gloss. And friend. I got your reservation ready.”

Jiibay whistled and a rolling door in the building lifted. Just barely clearing the rolling door as it came parallel with the ceiling, a tall, midnight-blue van pulled out of the garage and glided to a stop next to us.

Van was underselling it. It was closer in size to a delivery truck but far more elegant.

Enrique whistled. “Thanks, man.”

Jiibay walked along the outside of the van. “Self-driving and iced with a top-of-the-line Aasamisag out of Red Lake. Full psychoreactive holo-suite, bottle service, fourth-wave espresso machine.”

“Privacy?”

“For the next five minutes, all cameras and drones in this grid are seeing nothing. Once you’re on the road, this here is as private as I can build it. Short of a Panopt neutrino trap, no one will know what you say inside the van. Any other questions?”

“What about tea?” Gloss said.

“Enange,” Jiibay said. “My personal blend.” Both tall men embraced.

Enrique hustled us inside before the cameras and drones woke up. The driver’s compartment contained a seat for a human operator but the dash was set to self-driving.

In the back were several compartments, the first a wood-paneled bar with two stools and a couch. Further back was a sleeping area with four berths. It was nicer than most places I had lived. Between the bar and sleeping areas were a couple of toilet-closets. In the far back, behind the sleeping compartment, was a deep soaking tub.

It was clearly an executive transport, meant to convey people who refused to leave their offices unless traveling in a certain level of luxury. This thing must cost a fortune to rent.

I could barely feel it as the van began to accelerate. “Are we traveling on public roads?”

“Private Highway, my lad,” Enrique said. “Ever taken the PriHi before?”

“No,” I said. “I assumed it would be out of reach for us.”

“We’re among the wealthy today, or at least we’re pretending to be.” Enrique took a seat on the couch while Gloss moved behind the bar to start some water heating.

“Little bro,” Gloss said before he pulled down a tea cup and then unsealed a vacuum-packed metal canister, putting his nose deep into the jar and inhaling with pleasure. His head came back up. “You need sleep.”

“That’s right,” Enrique said. “You made two runs yesterday for Linney and from the look of your bloodshot eyes, the ice beat you up a little bit. But even that ice is trivial compared to what’s coming up. Sleep now.” Enrique pointed at the sleeping compartment in the back.

“In a while,” I said, sitting next to him on the couch. “I want to hear what you learned about White Tree.” Saying it felt good, felt like I had finally been accepted as one of the crew. Even the words COME FIND ME were easing up on me, barely visible now, perhaps even invisible. It was hard to say.

“Coffee, Gloss,” Enrique said. “For me at least. What about you, Rawls?”

“Yeah.”

Gloss was moving about the bar, checking out the equipment. “Espresso or pour-over?” he said.

“Espresso,” Enrique said.

“Two,” I said.

Enrique turned to me and began to explain. While he was inside White Tree’s headquarters, secretly meeting with his contact while consulting on regulatory issues—

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“Wait a minute,” I said. “Does your contact think of you as a consultant or a runner?”

Enrique smiled. “That part’s complicated. See, White Tree is like any megacorp. Its knowledge is compartmentalized for legal and strategic reasons. Some departments keep secrets from other departments. My contact is in network security. They know everything, including both the Henri Ascuncion and Enrique Lima aliases. But the people I work with in regulatory affairs, they know little about who I really am. Thanks, Gloss.”

Gloss came around the bar and handed over two warm demitasses, each holding a beautiful, creamy shot of dark-brown espresso topped with a dense layer of tiny golden bubbles. I nodded as I took mine.

Enrique stopped talking while he sipped, a ritual I knew better than to interrupt. I took in my espresso, feeling happiness and drive radiate through my body. My fingers tingled. The sub-subs seemed to like it particularly.

I looked around the bar compartment. Gloss sat on a stool, sipping his tea, typing up something for his dissertation. The lights above were small and recessed, but glowed down like miniature sunsets or moons. The couch was made of something particularly luxurious, an imitation leather. I was looking forward to taking a bath later. Forget about sleep, I wanted to be awake every minute I was in here.

After coffee, Enrique explained what he learned from White Tree. Good or bad clinical trial data could elevate or doom a new drug. Each successive level of clinical trial became an order of magnitude more expensive to conduct. Level I trials were cheap; Level IV trials required the GDP of a moderately-developed economy.

White Tree took extra steps to secure the data from the Level IV trials as they were the highest-stakes and most expensive. They contained the real-time sensory data of every patient during the monitoring period. Loads of data, loads of lives.

Enrique learned all about the special security layer. Every night, White Tree reshuffled the addresses of all their remote servers storing Level IV trial data, so that if a runner or rival corp learned about a target to run one day, by the following night the target would be somewhere else. In order to operate as a company, its employees had to know how to access the files of their own workgroups, so master lists of the day's server addresses were kept in the corps’ central servers. So a runner who wanted to crack a particular White Tree remote server first had to breach one of the main White Tree servers to find the location of the target server.

But that wasn’t all. Enrique also learned that White Tree maintained a secure archive of impounded icebreaker technology, which was highly illegal even for a megacorp. Enrique’s contact was dangling access to that archive as a potential payment to Enrique.

“For what?” I said.

“For messing with FUTUR Design’s plans in the next fiscal year. Irregular corporate warfare, young son. White Tree wants us to fight their battles for them.”

I thought about it for a moment.

“Go after the icebreaker archive if you want,” I said. “All I want to do is crack a White Tree central so that I can find out what happened to Freya.”

“Don’t be hasty,” Enrique said. I saw his point. White Tree was a global company with operations in nearly all of the world's countries. It could store data anywhere, although like any megacorp it wanted to find the right balance of cost, strong corporate privacy laws, and tight physical security. Political instability could lead to torched or seized server farms, or—just as bad—power-grid brown-outs that left servers overheating.

The secured icebreaker archive was in Kuala Lumpur, too far away to reach physically, Enrique explained. “Those breakers could come in handy when we breach the White Tree remote with the Level IV data. It’s bound to have some nasty security.”

“Like a mean red spider?” I said.

“Someone’s been paying attention.”

“Enrique,” I said. “I’m ready. Let me make the run on a White Tree central. We’ll scope out the remote. Then, if we need additional tools, let’s look at the icebreaker archive.”

Enrique regarded me carefully. “OK, young son,” he said. “We’ll play it your way this time. But only because you’re talented enough that I want to see how you get in.”

I felt embarrassed as well as slightly sick. Enrique and Gloss still didn’t know about my cybernetic eyes. They were convinced that everything I had done derived from my natural talent. It was getting harder and harder to tell them, and I felt like every time we talked running, I was lying by omission.

“Thanks,” I said. And left it at that.

Enrique brought out a console, like a chunky briefcase that had been hiding under the seat. He opened it to reveal a set of holographic spheres rotating around a center, like plants. “Test time. This is a virtual environment. Nothing in here will hurt you. Show me what you’ve learned since the last time I saw you.”

“Right now?”

Enrique was unspooling a cable from the case. “I need to know if you’re ready.”

It felt good that he wasn’t insisting on me getting some sleep the way he did when I first met him.

I felt cocky and twisted the cable into my net port. “Hit me.”

If jacking into the net from an node in a crash space felt like being dropped onto a public highway at night, then jacking into Enrique’s virtual environment felt like being dropped into an empty aluminum can. It was almost totally dark but for a far-off light. My movements echoed.

But I wasn’t alone for long. There, at the far end of what I could only call the can, a shape was unfolding out of light and starting to stream bullets at me. I called them bullets but they came in a variety of regular polygons. What they had in common with meatspace bullets was that they felt hostile and they moved fast on pre-determined trajectories.

The first wave of them was separating and I could sense the gaps that were about to open just before those gaps did open. I flitted my arrowhead avatar between them and in a moment found myself in the space between waves of projectiles, the first wave behind me and the second wave about to hit.

The spaces here were tighter but I kept my movements sharp and made it through. More than anything it felt like piloting that AI breaker—the water strider—up the scales of the neural python, if the scales had been the bullets. The simile felt beautiful. It reminded me, too, of Gloss’s whale avatar dodging the gestural harpoons of the Starbuck hunting it.

This was ice. Something like ice.

The third wave made me keep my movements cribbed and twitchy. There were times when I didn’t believe I could make it through the cascade of polyhedrons—they felt like killer roleplaying dice—but I found yet another second-and-a-half to breathe before the fourth wave was upon me.

Looking ahead at the gaps that appeared and just as quickly vanished in the patterns of the ice, I realized that I wouldn’t be able to make it through this wave on my own.

But I had a breaker, of course I did. Hungry Creek was always running at my side and I activated it here. As good as it was at breaking digital walls, it did not interact with the dense pack of bullets much at all. Perhaps it shook some of them loose but not enough to help me get through.

I found time stretching out now. It was like Zeno’s Paradox: in the time that the fourth wave of deadly dodecahedrons had crossed half the distance to me, I had remembered and deployed Hungry Creek and found it useless. In the time the bullets crossed half the remaining distance, I now inventoried the other tools available.

In Enrique’s virtual environment, I found an assortment of simulated breakers available to me. There were two different masks: comedy and tragedy. There was also an assortment of lockpicks: diamond, rake, and tension wrench. Lastly there was something energetic and amorphous, like a quasar held in a containment field.

I picked the quasar and deployed it. Instantly I felt all the bullets derez, becoming smaller and smaller until they did not exist at all. But I also felt the tremendous wrenching sensation of the cosmic energy I was channeling catastrophic amounts of virtual power.

When the fifth wave came, I was too tired to do anything. Couldn’t find a breaker to respond to my thoughts. Could barely move my arrowhead. The packed pyramids advancing on me seemed almost to be vibing, dancing, changing positions with each other. They shattered my arrowhead without concern for me at all. I felt, dimly, like I was forgetting to breathe.

With a gasp that burned my lungs, I became aware that I was reclined on the couch in the van, my chest bare and covered in sweat.

“What the heck was that?” I said to Enrique.

Gloss’s Encyclopedia of Ice

Name

Aasamisag

Manufacturer

Red Lake Defense Cooperative

Cost to rez

negligible (corps); moderate (independents)

Nguyen-Okafor complexity

4

Type

Platform

Subtype

Independent

Subroutines

1: stops a run; but secures only small, mobile servers