Chapter 26. Afterimage

“I don’t think running White Tree HQ again is a good idea,” Enrique said.

Without a word I reached past him to the cable, pulled it to my net port.

Enrique’s eyes were disapproving. “You’re acting like a child. If you jack in, I’ll cut the connection.”

“You want to know how I broke that ice?” I said. “Dr. Rashida discovered that my eyes were implanted when I was a toddler and they can boost breakers. She said they’re labeled as a White Tree/FUTUR Design collab.”

“That’s not possible,” Gloss said automatically, and Enrique extended a hand to him. They looked at each other, then Enrique turned back to me. “Listen to me very carefully,” he said. “Have you ever received any messages on your eyes?”

“Yes,” I said.

“From whom?”

“I don’t know. Maybe Freya.”

“What makes you think that?”

“I see the words ‘Come find me’ over my vision. It becomes more or less intense depending on how much I’m looking for her.”

“Damn,” Enrique said, and looked out the window.

“We should go,” Gloss said.

Enrique was nodding, stroking his stubble.

“Wait,” I said. “In the remote server, I saw that she survived the clinical trial. She was supposed to report back to White Tree. I want a chance at cracking HQ before they overwrite the defenses with new ones.”

“We’ll start packing up,” Enrique said. “You have one hour, but then I’m jacking you out.”

###

White Tree HQ: the pearly fractal forest, seen through the LOW BATTERY warnings on the interior of my eyes in netspace, drew me closer. I knew that Freya’s location—or recent location—was in there somewhere. And I knew I could get in.

The Chromosome Lock did not feel so eerie now that I knew that power and data pushed through Diamond could break it. And the Membrane? Trivial. I was a runner now, slotting a full rig. Just like Gloss and Enrique, a professional—

The innermost ice, which had remained misty and dormant on my first run, started to gather as I approached. I tensed, ready to dodge, even more ready to fight.

The ice formed into an enormous golden figure before me, wielding a splendid recurved bow: hunter ice. Something was wrong. It didn’t look like a White Tree product. The design was self-mythologizing, inspired by antiquity. It could only be Resheph, the ancient Phoenician god, the work of 7Wonders. Licensed to protect a White Tree central server, it was a stronger piece of ice than I had encountered before.

I could practically feel the gravitational flux of capital as the details of the god ice’s skin, its armor, the digital woodgrain of its bow sharpened before me. Whatever this thing cost, it was tremendous. I meant that it sent literal tremors through the net. I could feel the stream of patents transferred, credit for medical breakthroughs reassigned, subsidiary corporate entities dissolved and created to house these re-homed assets as the ice came into being. Not quite conscious. Not quite intelligent. But focused on one thing. Protection. Make that two things. Protection and destruction.

Resheph drew back its bow, and I brought Mask up over my arrowhead. I could feel my eyes straining, feel the draw on our accounts as Mask tried to boost itself. Then the arrow cut through my arrowhead like an irrefutable argument.

The breakers were gone. I knew that instantly. I could feel Hungry Creek and Mask wiped from where they had lived inside me, inside the console, in the spaces in between.

Deep blackness was all I saw. I heard an intermittent, tinkling tone that I knew meant one thing: connection terminated by server.

In my nose was the smell of melted plastic and scorched metal. I breathed in the sweet resin of molten flux-core solder, a scent of childhood, of Dad’s workbench.

“I can’t see,” I said to no one.

“Little bro,” came Gloss’s voice. “We have to go.”

“I can’t see, Gloss.” I felt his arms embracing me, lifting me from the bed.

“It’s your eyes, little bro,” he said as he set me down on the floor so that I could find my feet. “I can see the telltales winking in your irises. They’re out of charge.”

Panic shot through me. “How do I recharge them?”

“I don’t know,” Gloss said, “but I would guess you need sun and you need rest. Unfortunately, neither of those things are available. Come on—”

The boom that shook the farmhouse seemed to have been preceded by the sound of something tearing, like a bedsheet ripped in half.

“Oh no,” Gloss said.

But I could hear something, the clacking of claws, the scissoring of many legs outside the house.

“They took out the van,” Gloss whispered. “Enrique.”

“Where is he?”

“He was out there. Come on.” I felt him take my hand and lead me out of the room. “Stairs,” he hissed.

I let go his hand to hold onto the rail. My bare feet found the edges of each step, and we moved quickly down them, not making a lot of noise, but not being very quiet, either.

On the ground floor, I placed my hand on Gloss’s shoulder. When he moved, I moved behind him.

We leaned against a wall. I slid my shoes on. Gloss cinched a bag across his chest. It sounded like he’d managed to grab some of the hardware. We listened at the front door.

There was a sound in the background like something repeatedly beating against something else, something chopping wind. And there it the other sound again, the sound of legs, hardened, either mechanical or alloy-reinforced biological, and many of them. These were not the jangly steps of tooled-up human operators. They were more like animals.

“Cy-otes,” Gloss whispered, and his voice was barely more than a breath.

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“What do we do?”

I heard a metallic click like the chambering of a round in a firearm. “When I open the door,” Gloss said, “you stay here. Anything comes through there, you stab it.” I could feel him press the heavy handle of a chef’s knife into my hand. “I’ll be back in a minute.”

Then he swung the door open, stepped through carefully, and closed it behind himself. What followed was the scrabbling of legs and a strange, mournful, echoic howl. It sounded like there was dozens of the things out there.

Then came a sleek crack like a hammer hitting a piece of sheet metal. And again and again. The door nudged itself open.

“Gloss?” I said.

Silence.

Suddenly it was on me, knocking me down, the pain bright and hot in my shoulders, like nails being driven in. Something smashed into my face. Taking the handle of the knife in both hands, I pushed it upward and twisted.

The yowl that followed shot through me and, just for a moment, I felt like I had stabbed myself, or stabbed Gloss, so disconcerting was the sound.

But then I became aware of the dead heft of fur and chrome on top of me. I rolled it off, wiped my face, sticky with blood. I threw up.

Then I got back to my feet, but the knife was gone.

I heard a whisper. “Bro.”

Stepping through the open door, my voice creaked. “Gloss?”

I felt him take my hand and put it on my shoulder. “Get ready to run.” I patted him to show I understood.

Then he was moving and I was trying to keep up, to keep my hand on his shoulder or at least his back. I felt gravel underneath my shoes, and could hear the crackle of our feet on it. The sweet smell of prairie sage was on the air, just beyond us. Then I felt Gloss pulling me into knee-high grass, brittle and sharp against my ribs. It hissed as we moved through it.

I heard some kind of mechanical system unseal itself and Gloss was pushing me forward, one big hand on the top of my head to make me duck, the other on my back to urge me up. I squeezed into something, then I felt Gloss sit next to me, and then the sucking sound of a door sealing and a motor starting. I felt a shuddering and the hard scrabble of pebbles and dirt moving.

“Where are we?” I said.

“We’re in one of the crisis pods. You should sleep,” he said.

“I don’t know if I can.”

I felt something in my palm. A pill.

“If you need it,” Gloss said.

I brought my hand to my mouth. A moment later he placed a bottle of water in my hand.

###

—unfinished business—

—more data inside me—

—never exported—

Freya rubbed the back of her neck where the data jack clung, hard and insensitive, both part of her and not. She boarded the next train. She threw the box lunch away and ordered a croissant and coffee.

Her brain felt like it was shattering that night. She felt terror and ghostly pain. It left her curled up under a Private Highway pylon in downtown Bull City. She thought she was going to have a stroke right there and die and that no one would ever find her and her parents would never know what had happened to her.

A tall black man in a cloak glowing with circuitry and carrying a staff carved from bleached driftwood stood over her.

“Look what the net coughed up,” the man said, crouching. “Tell me your name.”

“Freya,” she said. Forget Kristin Dearborn. That name wasn’t hers.

“What’s the matter, Freya?”

“I’m having a stroke,” she said.

“You’re too young for a stroke. I think you’re having a panic attack,” he said. “Let me show you what helps me.” He reached into his cloak and pulled out a thin white stick, a conductor’s baton.

He started to count time with it. “Breathe in, three four, hold two three four, breathe out three four, hold two three four.”

He led her through the breathing again and again until she felt her heart slow and the panic withdraw.

“Where are you staying?” he said.

“I don’t know,” she said.

He helped her up and led her to an old diesel truck, where he and his entourage placed her in the bed. The scratched steel ridges of the bed reminded her of her grandfather’s pick-up. They drove her to a brick dormitory full of street people. The man in the cloak gave her a bag of tea and showed her to a room with a mattress. He showed her how the door locked with a deadbolt from the inside. He told her his name was The Prophet Ezra.

She asked how much he wanted for the room.

He said, “Slot this and tell me what you find.” He pulled from his cloak a wafer, an irregularly-shaped printed circuit board inlaid with strange whorls of copper and dots of integrated circuitry like chocolate chips.

“Slot it?”

He gestured at her ear. “I need to know,” he said. “Tell me tomorrow.”

He left her alone then, in the small dorm room with its mattress, a set of threadbare but clean sheets, a sealed plastic bottle of water, and a stained desk. She had her toiletry kit from the hotel a year ago.

A year ago! She had no memories of her time on the grid. The panic was still there, in the background of her self.

She held the wafer of cultured flash memory in her hands. She moved to the desk and set the wafer down. She poked at it with her hand. She got up, walked around the room. She checked the walls for a net jack. She couldn’t find any.

Did she trust The Prophet Ezra? He had given her a place to sleep and a door that locked. That was worth something. But to slot this? She wasn’t sure. She pushed it away. She curled up on the mattress and slept some.

In the morning, she opened the coarse burnt-orange curtains and looked out over what was clearly a poor area of Bull City. People stood on the streets talking in small groups. Old vehicles crawled up and down the cracked asphalt. Corporate security drones passed overhead.

There was a knock on her door. She opened it to find The Prophet Ezra there, still in his cloak, still carrying his staff.

“Well? What’s on it?”

She stepped away from the door and invited him in. He sat on the mattress. She sat at the desk. “I didn’t slot it,” she said. “I’m sorry.”

“Don’t be sorry,” he said. “Tell me why.”

“I spent the last year connected to the grid. My mind, or my brain, I’m not sure which, was part of the backbone of the net. I’m not ready to slot anything just yet.”

The Prophet Ezra put his hands together. “Did you know that I was one of the first to be networked? Back when the only jobs I could get with my record were slaughtering chickens or plugging in?”

“I didn’t know that,” she said. “I’m sorry.”

“What did I tell you? Don’t be sorry. As soon as I saw you I knew where you’d come from. I recognize it in your eyes. And I wouldn’t do anything to hurt you. I’ve been hurt myself and I’m careful around others. This—” he gestured at the wafer “is harmless. There’s nothing executable on it. It’s just literature. Bacterial poetry acid-etched in cuprified polymer. And literature is neurosecurity. But you are under no obligation to slot it or anything.”

“You could have told me that last night,” she said.

“True,” he said. “Should have done that.”

“Thank you for helping me,” she said.

“We look out for each other here,” he said.

She dug out the small amount of paper money she had and gave it to him. “It’s all I have right now,” she said.

He thanked her and put the money in his cloak. “Feel better now that it’s a transaction?”

“Yes,” she said.

He nodded. “What will you do?”

“Find work,” she said. “Find the runner community.”

“The runner community! LOL!” He sounded like an old person, which he was. “Bunch of drunks and stim addicts. Stay away from them. They think they’re heroes because they do slightly more damage to the megacorps than they do to themselves. Take my advice. Get a job. It should be easy for you. Do you have a criminal record?”

“No.”

“Get a job. Go to Research Triangle Arcology. You already have a data jack. They’ll have something for you there.”

“I came here so I wouldn’t have to get a corporate job,” she said.

“I know you did, sweetie. Still. Take the bus to RTA.”

When she walked out of the shelter, she didn’t know where else to go, so she began walking toward the transit station. Under the washed-out silver sky, nothing promising appeared between her and the station, so she paid with her debit card and boarded a bus for RTA. The bus roared through tree-lined highway carved through the city. Then the bus was swallowed by an enormous tunnel. When the bus stopped, she found herself in a crystal palace that rose up and up. The logos of luxury brands glowed on tall banners and the air smelled artificial, like one of those cinnamon rolls that come out of the shiny tubes at the grocery store.

She was in a kind of shopping mall. The other people on the bus were contractors—janitors, child-care workers—who were passing through security. She took the escalator to the mezzanine, where she found a kiosk labeled RECRUITING in a font that appeared familiar.

###

When I woke, I saw a low strip of red light illuminating the sleeping bulk of Gloss on a mat on the floor. The air circulator was humming. I saw the bottle of water next and sipped from it.

I could see again.

The CheRRy’s Guide to the Hardware Store

Name

Copy Substrate

Manufacturer

Many

Legal status

Legal if licensed.

Description

A homogenous piece of synthetic cortex with a power supply and a write-once ready-many-times port. Looks like hard candy but don’t eat it.

Cost

More than you can comfortably afford.

Function

Corps use them to back-up their more compact AIs or Simulants. Runners use them to back up only the most essential programs, such as icebreakers. Except for pot-smoking digital explorers and show-offs who use them to back-up all kinds of nonsense.