Chapter 24. Running Molten

I helped Enrique move the equipment through the barn and outdoors.

The landscape was totally flat, the sky enormous. Tall yellow grasses surrounded us, moving in the wind. I could smell sage. There were trees in the distance, arranged in a line, shorter than trees in the green areas of Carthage, more like trees on the top of a mountain, except younger-seeming, less gnarled. In the distance were transparent structures like giant maple seeds sitting blade-up in the grass.

“Where are we?” I said.

“Kansas.” Enrique led me along a gravel path up the hill to an old farmhouse in peeling yellow paint. Two stories tall and studded with dusty windows, it looked like it had been vacant for years.

But inside, I found it well-kept. The house smelled of old pine rosin, the kind of thing Dad always kept around wrapped in a rag for when he wanted to play the fiddle. He used to play sad songs, songs for ghost towns wiped out by superstorms. I remember the convenience store man calling a certain storm an act of God. “That ain't no act of God,” Dad had said. “That was 100% manmade. If they wouldn't strip mine the mountain tops these storms wouldn't be half as bad up here.” That memory stopped me for a moment, made me resolve to call him as soon as I could do it safely.

“This a crash space?” I said.

“Smart kid.”

“Does this place have a good net connection?”

“You’d be surprised. We picked it because it happens to be on top of a Chronos trunk line. Bring the cases upstairs if you please.”

After I moved the cases, and then another load of cases from under the bunks in the van, and after I had helped Gloss tidy up the van’s small bar, the three of us sat in the farmhouse’s living room under a slow ceiling fan, sipping tap water from scratched Gibraltar glasses.

“Let’s hit White Tree HQ,” I said.

“Tomorrow,” Enrique said.

“I’m rested, I’m ready to go.”

Enrique looked over at Gloss, who leaned forward. “White Tree HQ is triple-iced. We’re guessing they use diversified ice types: puzzle or shooter on the outside, shooter or puzzle in the middle, platform on the inside. That’s typically how White Tree arranges its ice. Now the breaker you built with Linney is good for breaking the platform, but you’re going to get taken apart by the other ice. Fortunately, we have obtained a couple other breakers for you. We just need to tune them to your physiology. That means it’s arcade time for you.”

“More death dice?”

“I’m afraid so. You’ll spend the day jacked in. Tomorrow you run for real.”

Gloss gave me a tube of some kind of paste and then wired me up with sticky pads connected to my temples, neck, chest, arms, and abs. He and Enrique left me alone in an upstairs bedroom with the briefcase that contained the arcade simulation. Now I noticed the vinyl sticker that someone had applied to metal shell of the case: a series of cartoon tombstones.

“Cute,” I said, and jacked in.

Immediately I found the feeling of being in the can somewhat different. Instead of the vast array of tools that had been available to me last time, now I only had Hungry Creek, which I knew was useless, and two new ones: Mask and Diamond.

Even though I didn’t need a breaker for the first wave, I deployed Mask, letting it sheath my arrowhead and turn it into something resembling the dice themselves. I found that they floated through me, drawing hardly any current.

I moved through the third, fourth, and fifth waves using the minimum amount of resources possible, sliding between the deadly dice in tight, controlled movements, masking to allow them to pass through me when I had to, and then, boosting Mask to trick my way through the difficult waves.

Waves six, seven, and eight down. On wave nine, the dice came at me in varied spirals, different shapes interlaced, nesting within each other and then spreading out like fingers before snapping together in tight, impassable phalanxes. If I were some kid off the street, I would have marveled at the patterns, been dazed into paralysis. Hell, that happened to me yesterday.

Today, I saw in an instant the way through. Some parts of the wave were simple enough to Mask through. Others required quick, twitchy movements.

Waves ten through twenty passed without any real increase in difficulty. The only danger I faced was getting bored. Yeah, I got shredded and booted a few times. More than a few. But eventually I could make it through wave twenty without a mistake.

On wave twenty-one, I saw a dense murmuration of dice that looked impenetrable even to me. But I could feel my implanted eyes trace the path through the ever-shifting maze just as the tools to execute that path rose on either side of me, ready to rock. Forward, left, back, double forward, Mask, double forward, right, right, Mask, back, triple forward. And so on and so on to the end.

That had been my 153rd attempt, all together. After wave twenty-one, the pulsing light at the end of the simulation just waited there at the end of the can. It sent no more dice down to me. I floated up to touch it. Nothing happened. No congratulations, no obvious glitch. It made me feel like something had happened that wasn’t supposed to.

When I jacked out, it was cool and dark outside and I could hear insects. The bed beneath me was slick with sweat. A glass of tepid water waited on the table next to me. I downed it and staggered to the bathroom. In the mirror, I was this weird, scrawny creature studded with wires. I tore the adhesive pads away, ripping out a fair bit of chest hair in doing so.

Stolen from its rightful place, this narrative is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

I grunted with pain, then dressed and went downstairs. Enrique and Gloss were nowhere to be found.

Sitting on the porch with a mug of bad decaf, the only thing I could find in the kitchen, I saw the starfield above dense and deep. Not since I had left home had I been this far from city lights. The constellations were different here, maybe. Or maybe I was different.

I heard movement among the dry prairie grasses. In a moment I saw the swinging of a pair of flashlights as Gloss and Enrique emerged from the trail near the creek.

“Just checking out those things that look like maple keys,” Gloss said. “Turns out they’re Blooming Prairie-designed crisis pods. Built to survive tornadoes and even generate energy from them. But they work great against corporate surveillance. They lower into the ground and the blade turns radar-invisible. Really remarkable stuff. Unlocked, too. There must be a co-op nearby.”

“How far did you make it into the simulation?” Enrique said to me.

“After I cleared wave twenty-one, the sim didn’t do anything else. It was boring so I jacked out.”

“Wave twenty-one?” Gloss said.

“Yeah.”

Enrique and Gloss glanced at each other. “Neither of us have made it past wave twenty before. Nor has anyone else that we know of.”

“Well, I did. You think I broke the sim?”

“Maybe, kid,” Enrique said, passing by me with a warm hand on my shoulder. Good work. Let’s get some food in you and put you to bed.”

###

When I woke it was not yet dawn. The slow brightening and fading of red lights in the distance marked radio towers. The world felt lonesome until the moment I could smell coffee.

We’d stayed too late with Enrique, who told us stories from the old days, stories of runners dead or retired or gone to work for the other side, stories of major scores that never became the last score, runners being notoriously good at squandering their newly-fattened accounts on icebreakers, implants, charity, and chems. But even if I had stayed up later than I planned, I awoke rested. I’d like to believe that the stories helped.

I came downstairs, greeted not only by the smell of coffee but by that of browning butter—real butter, from real cows—and accepted a steaming mug from Enrique, who was dressed and shaved and wore a collared shirt and blazer even though we were in the middle of the prairie, far from anyone else.

“Expecting company?” I said.

He just smirked, and plated fresh fruit and an omelet and handed it to me. “Eat up. You’ll need your strength. Today you cut White Tree.”

In contrast to last night’s lively back-and-forth storytelling, the morning’s breakfast was quiet, with each of us ruminating on his role in the imminent series of runs. For myself, I could say that I felt distracted. I was close to finding out what happened to Freya, and I found that I both did and did not want to know. What if her fate were horrible? What if there was still a chance to extract her from some dismal place?

I looked up from my plate to find Enrique looking directly at me. “I know it’s hard, young son, but you have to stop thinking about her right now. Instead you need to think about the first piece of ice, and then the second, and then the third, and then the server.”

“Thanks.”

After breakfast we gathered in the bedroom. I lay in my bed, shirtless, hooked up to my console, which held Hungry Creek, as well as the other breakers in a separate piece of hardware built into one of the briefcases we had lugged inside yesterday.

Gloss checked the connections and Enrique attached sensors to my body. “Try to put them on places where I’ve already ripped out my chest hair,” I said.

Gloss handed me the cable for my net port. “Ready?” he said.

I jacked in.

Midnight highway. In the distance, the representation of White Tree HQ appeared like its namesake: a fractal forest of white trees, manicured and overlapping with each other. It looked like White Tree’s aesthetics team had worked over their network architecture.

In what felt like no time at all, the first ice rezzed. And it was a giant one: a tall, porous curtain filled with what appeared to be white double-helices. I could feel it looking into me, could see the white helices filling it with colored links between matched pairs of nucleic acids. It seemed to be reading me. I could almost feel my body shivering in the bedroom, far away in Kansas.

The spaces between the helices felt far smaller than those that I passed through in the arcade sim. As my eyes zeroed in on them, I could see that the surface of each helix was razor sharp and studded with suckers as on an octopus’s arm, each sucker shaped like the data packet of a credit transfer. Aside from reading my identity down to my DNA, this thing was going to cut me up and drain my bank account all at once.

It would let me through, but little would be left of me. There was no dodging this ice, no amount of maneuvering that would get my arrowhead through on its own. It was far too complex, the product of the viciously creative security architects at White Tree.

But I wasn’t helpless. I was a runner, with the backing of some of the best. I deployed Diamond instead, and felt my body warm as the breaker drew current and data, the hot blue processing tip of the diamond-shaped lock pick sliding into the minute spaces within the nearest helix and lifting, gently, but enough to denature its structure.

As complex as the ice was, in that moment, Diamond was equally if not more complex. The helices turned brittle and began to fall away in all directions, like dried and broken ramen noodles. The path was deep, dark, and clear. I was through the first ice. From somewhere came murmuring voices: Enrique and Gloss, I thought.

I shut down the hot processes that had lit Diamond like a welding torch. No sense in wasting cash on empty netspace. Accelerating hard, I dared the middle ice to rez.

I expected robust shooter ice, something that would tax Mask and bring me to the limit of my resources. Instead, what solidified in front of me was a simple Membrane, the razor-lined red wall that had cut me and stopped my run days ago—a lifetime ago, it felt like.

Getting through Membrane was not difficult. Hungry Creek dissolved the wall and dulled the razor ringing it. We spent almost nothing in the process. I slipped through the gap in Membrane and slowed my approach, ready to face the innermost ice. I could feel Enrique’s and Gloss’s eyes on me. I knew they were relying on my skills.

But as I approached the white mist ringing the pearlescent forest, nothing happened. The mist did not coalesce into the spiky defensive ring that I expected. No shooter targeted me. No puzzle tried to confound me. I floated above the mist as if it were not even there.

At the base of the forest, I could feel the Vista Processor initializing. I had only a short time before the server kicked me out—it wouldn’t be possible to access everything. From Enrique’s reconnaissance, I knew which branch held the addresses of the remote servers, and I knew which one held the location of the icebreaker archive. I targeted the remote server first, then dove deep into as much other data as I could find—

—ghosts, images, the neutral tone of scientists discussing something with each other—

—blood, exposed organs—

—a line of black body bags—

I woke. “Got it,” I said, as cool as I could. But my hands were shaking.

Gloss’s Encyclopedia of Ice

Name

Chromosome Lock

Manufacturer

White Tree

Cost to rez

high

Nguyen-Okafor complexity

6

Type

Puzzle

Subtype

Red; sequencer; toll

Subroutines

3: sequences runner genome; bleeds runner; siphons money; primes meatspace traps keyed to runner genome