Chapter 25. Induction Team

“Server addresses coming through,” Gloss said. “Level IV clinical data and impounded icebreaker archive.”

“You ready to go again?” Enrique said.

I nodded.

“Good man,” he said. He turned to his laptop, made a few keystrokes. I noticed the server map. It showed the icebreaker archive.

“That’s not right,” I said. “I want to hit the remote. I want to see what Freya saw.”

Enrique looked at me, his face suddenly cold. I could almost see the words ‘how dare you’ forming in his mind.

He shook his head. “You need to run the icebreaker archive now. I want those breakers, and I have the backup gear ready to go.” He patted one of the big steel cases. “Who knows how long White Tree will keep those things on hand. Possessing them is illegal, even for a corp.”

“No,” I said. “If you want the icebreakers, run them yourself. I’m going after the Level IV clinical data.”

Enrique and Gloss looked at me. It was Enrique who spoke first. “The defenses on that remote might be too much for you. This is not your decision to make.”

“The hell it isn’t,” I said. I was so close to finding Freya now that I felt like tearing the monitors from my chest, slamming that cable home, and not saying another word to them. “Whose brain is on the line here?”

“I taught you,” Enrique said. “I took the risk when I brought you in. I choose the targets. You make the runs.”

“Is that how it worked with Linney’s ex? I heard you picked the target that flatlined him.”

Enrique stood up suddenly, knocking a glass of water onto the floor. He pointed at me. “That was not my fault. I trained him the way I trained you: never run last click. Especially against White Tree, only run when you have an icebreaker that can handle shooters and you’re well-rested and your system has been purged of chems. That last part I never had to tell you because you’re not a chem user. I would like to think you have enough sense not to faceplant a trap when you’re exhausted, but maybe not. Maybe I was wrong about you.”

Enrique stormed out of the room, leaving me and Gloss alone. “Hey,” Gloss said quietly. “You want to go after your friend.”

“You get it.”

“The boss has his plans,” Gloss said. He stood up carefully. “I’ll go talk to him. You just rest for a bit.”

Gloss moved silently out of the room, reappearing a moment later to throw a rag over the spilled water on the floorboards. I watched the fibers soak up the spill, and waited in silence. The front door slammed, and then opened and closed again. They were talking outside.

I looked out the window. By the sun I figured it was still midmorning. The White Tree HQ run had taken almost no time at all. I looked at the monitors. We had plenty of credit left with the Great Plains Power and Data Co-op, and still more with Carthage Data and Energy.

Bringing Enrique’s laptop toward me, I rekeyed the server map, found the remote holding the Level IV clinical trial data. I ran my thumb along the chrome flange of the thick cable fitted for my net port.

I jacked in.

The remote appeared as a single pillar, a dark crimson skyscraper surrounded by a triple-ringed moat of mist. I accelerated. I knew I was ready for anything.

A familiar neural python encircled the tower, its head fixing on my vector, its fangs gleaming, dense with venomous logic. I donned Mask, opened the channels for power and data, and dove straight into the snake’s mouth. I could feel the ice go passive around me. It could not even recognize me as a target.

Next up, a series of blood-red sine waves surrounded the tower, pulsing, as if attuned to my thoughts. Something about this was odd. It behaved differently than ice I’d seen before. I wasn’t talking about the attunement to me; that was familiar from the chunky Chromosome Lock I’d broken earlier in the morning. I was talking about some of the sine waves. While some were clearly sharp, menacing, and threatening to slice me up if I tried to cross them, others appeared almost helpful, like Dr. Qin’s painkiller software, as if it would be almost comforting to let the ice wash over me.

It must have been some kind of trick. I didn’t trust a thing that White Tree did. I reached out with Diamond, found the mechanism that generated the sine waves, and twisted so that the waves collapsed. I broke through all of them, the sharp ones and the ones that mirrored the therapeutic routines in Dr. Qin’s office. This was no time to experiment.

Checking the monitors, I saw that for a small piece of ice that did not appear especially dangerous, it was relatively expensive to break. Maybe I should have let the therapeutic routines operate on me. In breaking it, I saw its brand name and registration pass over my consciousness. It was called Mood. I filed that name and net signature away.

One more ice to go, and a healthy balanace in the bank. Let’s do this.

When the innermost ice rezzed, I almost didn’t see it. But then I felt the sticky web holding me, just outside the facade of the skyscraper. I felt silent movement, tiny vibrations. Then I saw it, above me, a shadowy spider that blotted out the view of anything else. The spider god of legend, the mean red ice that every runner feared.

Caught in the web, there was no way to dodge it. I remembered back to the arcade sim, Tombstones, how I was able to stretch out time to form a plan. As the spider leapt, I willed time to expand.

But it didn’t work; the spider was on me. I drew Mask to me but the spider punched right through it, cracking my arrowhead open. I could feel something shuffling, something rerarranging in the net around me. The impact of the spider had shaken me loose from the web and I darted to a far corner. As fast as the spider was, I could be almost as fast. I couldn’t outrun it, but I’d put enough distance between us to think it through.

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Mask on its own wasn’t enough. It simply couldn’t reach the spider’s level of complexity. But perhaps there was a way through. I re-initialized Mask, covered my arrowhead with it as the spider leapt again. This time, I opened my eyes, my implanted eyes boring deep into the spiders code, its recognition routines, leveraging that knowledge to improve Mask, make its disguise that much more convincing.

This time, when the spider reached me, it passed right through me, and I opened up the throttle, dove through the web into the center of the skyscraper—

###

—a woman awoke in a hotel room in glaring light. Her neck was stiff. She had difficulty speaking. She found a remote control and managed to close the curtains. There was a glass of water next to her bed. She drank it. She ordered food by mashing buttons on the remote. All they gave her at first was banana pudding. But it wasn’t the homogenous yellow gel she’d grown up with. It was real Southern banana pudding, chunky and very sweet—

—Freya. It was Freya’s memories I was experiencing—

She spent a week in the cool and comfortable hotel room, reading and watching documentaries on the wall monitor. She changed bandages and took antibiotics, pain medicine, and nootropics.

She looked out the window of the hotel room to see the dense steel canyons of the Neurocapital District. This was the place where thought became money. If the net itself had a cortex it was here. And soon she would become part of the infrastructure.

Beyond were the steaming working-class suburbs of Carthage. She saw rows and rows of small houses. Each one needed paint and a new roof. She saw corner stores with bars on their windows and steady foot traffic in and out. She saw the gleaming pylons of the Private Highway stretching above the suburbs. She could see the glossy capsules of executive sedans gliding along the Private Highway.

She was scared.

She had just about mustered the courage to ask whether she was permitted to go outside when there was a knock at her door. She opened it to find two young men and a young woman in white coats carrying tablets.

“Induction team,” one young man said.

“Wait,” Freya said. “I thought I had two more days.”

“Your numbers are looking good,” the young man said.

“You’ve been monitoring me?”

The young woman laughed and put a hand on her shoulder. “You’re funny,” she said.

The young man who’d spoken held out a small cartridge with a few metal prongs on the inside. He gestured at Freya’s head. “May I?”

Freya bent her head forward to give him access to the second data jack, not the one in her chest but the one in her neck. He plugged the cartridge into her neck. She felt something, maybe, some distant vibration.

He removed the cartridge and looked at something on the display. He showed it to his colleagues, who said nothing and betrayed nothing.

The three of them looked at her expectantly. Because they annoyed her, she took her time packing what few things she’d brought, and took the tiny lotions and soaps from the bathroom. She followed them down the quiet, carpeted hallway. She expected to be led onto an elevator and then taken to a waiting car. She was surprised when they brought her to a skyway bridging the hotel and another building. They crossed over street traffic and into a facility marked with a gnarled White Tree. Here they boarded an elevator. There were no buttons on the elevator. One of the young men held his wrist up to a transponder.

She could feel the descent.

“How far down are we going?” she asked.

The doctors looked at each other as if unsure whether they could tell her. Finally the young woman said, “Third sub-basement.”

When they got out of the elevator, she was struck by the warmth and humidity here and the hideous roar of giant fans in the ceiling. All around her were cylindrical tanks connected with hoses and cables. Each tank included a window. As she passed by, she could see an unconscious person inside each one.

They led her to a side room with a shower stall and a reclining chair already set up with an intravenous drip. They gave her a thick plastic bag for her clothing and left her alone. She packed away her outfit and washed in the shower with a sour-smelling liquid soap. She tore open the package they had left for her and put on a paper jumpsuit. She sat on the reclining chair and waited for them to return. When they did, one of them asked her lean back.

The young woman swabbed her arm with a disinfectant wipe. Freya turned her head away while the woman put in the IV. She asked Freya to count backward from one hundred. Freya was out before she made it to ninety-eight—

—I was so close. If I could only see more of the signage in the room—

—there was another memory—

Some other man in a white coat discharged her into the great hall of the Neurocapital District BRUTE station. In her old clothes that no longer fit her body, she shuffled forward, not lacking strength but rather coordination.

He’d given her a wristband loaded with 10K, an all-day transit pass, and a boxed lunch containing a soggy ham sandwich, mushy apple, and factory-made cookie. On the walk over, the man had told her that her muscles had been exercised twice daily via electronic stimulation during the year she was networked. He told her that the brains on the grid had processed more data, more experiences, more unintegrated AI dreams than any other humans in history.

She felt sick. Movement in the corner of her eye startled her. Just commuters leaving their trains.

“Where are you going, Ms. Dearborn?”

“That’s not my name.”

“Kristin Dearborn. That’s what your ID says.”

“But that’s not me,” she said. “My name is Freya.”

“The Freya identity is contaminated,” the man said. “Better get used to that. Where are you going?”

“I don’t know,” she said.

“Try Bull City,” he said. “Lots of young people up there. Just remember to report your residence and employment to corporate—”

###

I sat up in the bed in the farmhouse in Kansas, breathing hard. Purple warning symbols were flashing in my vision: LOW BATTERY. Outside it was late afternoon, the sun gone tangerine.

Enrique and Gloss were hunched over me. “She’s alive,” I said. “And I know how to find her.”

Enrique’s expression had softened since I’d seen him last. “You gave us a scare, kid. We thought we’d lost you in there.”

I thought back to the encounter with the mean red spider. “Mask wasn’t enough but I made it through.”

“One of the reasons we didn’t want you to make that run,” Gloss said, “was we knew the ice would be too complex for Mask.”

I looked at him. It hurt to see his kind, trusting face start to doubt me.

“How did you make it through?” Enrique said, sitting on the side of the bed. I looked at him. He watched me carefully. “Tell us everything now, please,” he added. Somehow it was his last word that hurt the most.

“I gave Mask a boost. With my eyes. Sometimes when I focus, I can look deep into the logic of the ice. I can see the right places to insert the breakers, the right ways to fool the recognition subroutines.”

“You did that once before, with the neural python and the water strider,” Enrique said.

“That’s right.”

“What I’m saying,” Enrique said, “is that you’ve developed quite a reliable talent in a short time.” I didn’t answer. Enrique watched me, as if waiting for me to speak. “That’s not impossible,” he said. “It’s just very unlikely. So why don’t you tell us what’s really going on?”

I looked down at my hands. The words LOW BATTERY kept obscuring my vision. “I’d rather run White Tree HQ again and find out where she is. Now.”

Gloss’s Encyclopedia of Ice

Name

Mean Red Spider

Manufacturer

White Tree

Cost to rez

high

Nguyen-Okafor complexity

5

Type

shooter

Subtype

red

Subroutines

3: bleeds runner; bleeds runner; randomizes corporate server addresses;