Chapter 28. Run It Back

Our driver rumbled us out of Neodesha in her old truck. Before we’d left the city limits she reached across me and punched the catch to the glove box, which fell open to reveal an assortment of vapes, patches, pills in hexagonal acrylic bottles, and tabs stuck to wax paper. “You boys want to get high?”

Gloss and I looked at each other. He shrugged, reached for a hot-pink patch.

“Can I get you anything, ma’am?” I said to be polite.

“Call me Renata,” she said. “And no thank you, young man, the hallucinogens I took with lunch are just starting to come on.”

Gloss and I looked again at each other again. We were interrupted by Renata’s raspy laughter. “I’m just messing with you boys. You should see your expressions. I only take coffee and cigarettes while I’m driving. The pharmacy is strictly for passengers.”

The empty, calm two-lane road stretched into infinity. Where I came from, there were twisty mountain roads that opened up onto views of gorgeous valleys dense with trees. Here? Not so much. I’d never been in a place so flat. I’d never such big fields.

The world felt so lonely, so orderly. I was grateful for Gloss’s company, and Renata’s.

“Hey,” she said, lighting a cigarette off a red-hot coil mounted on the dash, “you boys like to jack?”

“Come again?” I said in my most polite country-boy voice.

“Are you runners? You want to make a little money while we’re on the road?”

“You have a good net connection here?” The smell of cigarette smoke was almost impossible to detect as the air scrubbers hauled ass overhead.

“Anonymized, proxied to hell and back, rolled, dried, and ready to smoke. Plus I picked a juicy target loaded with fat data.”

She took a long draw on her cigarette and deftly piloted the rig around a red piece of flesh and dark fur on the road, surrounded by buzzards.

“How’d you know we were runners?” I said.

“For one, the way you contacted me on the net showed you had some sense. For two, when you climbed up on in here my scanner picked up a fair bit of chrome between the two of you.”

We rode in silence for a minute while Gloss and I processed that. “What corp operates your target?” I said.

“FUTUR Design.”

For the third time in a short while Gloss and I gave each other a look. I wasn’t sure that I could speak up but fortunately Gloss had my back. “Truth be told, Renata, we believe we’ve drawn some heat from FUTUR Design in recent days, so I’m not sure that running them right now is a good idea, especially on your rig.”

“Don’t pussy out on me, boys,” she said. “The connections are clean. Let’s make some money.” She slapped my knee and sucked the cigarette down to the filter, then stashed it in a steel can at her feet. Reaching forward, she flicked a switch and the compartment behind the seat opened. I saw a bed and, above it, a professional-grade netspace rig bundled away.

I looked at Gloss and shrugged.

“What are you running for breakers?” Gloss said.

“That’s a bit of a problem,” she said. “I was hoping you could help me out there.”

Silently, I mouthed “the icebreaker archive” to Gloss and he nodded.

“We know where we might find some,” I said. “Given our intel, it might be a bit spiky.”

“Don’t worry about that, boys,” she said. “I can get you patched up if you hit rough stuff.”

Gloss gave me a fist bump and handed me his laptop, then I slipped into the back.

With the laptop open on my knees, I flipped to the server map and queried that bit of silicon in my head branded as the Vista Processor but that was starting to feel more and more like part of me. Between the Vista and the sub-subs in my fingers, I went into a kind of trance, typing out the icebreaker archive’s address, that long string of hexadecimal characters that I’d exfiltrated from that one run that worked out right.

Meanwhile up front, Gloss had unlatched his big case and was hooking up the slabs of backup substrate to a thick jack that plugged into the side of Renata’s rig.

The net cable was in my hand without thinking. I kissed its tip, unbuttoned my shirt, and jacked in.

The icebreaker archive appeared a long way off on that familiar midnight highway. It looked like a deep pit, a black disc, some astrophysicist’s representation of a Schwarzchild singularity. It was ringed by a single raggedy strand of ice. To be honest, if I didn’t already know what it contained, I never would have connected to it. It was the most unpromising server I had ever seen in my short career as a runner.

I accelerated hard, trusting that whatever ice White Tree had installed here was either not worth rezzing or would let me through. I was breaking a rule that Enrique had given me: don’t run White Tree without something to break shooter ice.

I saw the ice began to firm up. Silently, I prayed for a Membrane so I could dissolve my way through it with Hungry Creek.

It was something else, something like a cat’s cradle game, a tight, red matrix of string. I let myself relax and piloted my way into it. As I neared, I saw that the positions of the strings were shifting, crossing and uncrossing each other, creating a moving labyrinth.

I could do this. I slid into the first big gap between strands, then tucked my way into a narrower gap, and a narrower one. Ahead I could see my options diminishing, so I reversed. Then, in a flash of insight, I noticed that given the vectors of the strings off my left side, a tunnel was about to open up even though it looked like a solid wall at the moment. I slammed my avatar hard left just as the strings moved away before me. Hauling ass through the open tunnel, I had just about made it when a string moved down from the above, slicing through my avatar.

Somewhere in meatspace I spat blood and kept on trucking.

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I’d made it through the ice even without a breaker. There was nothing between me and the deep, dark pit. I piloted my avatar dead center, paused for a moment, and executed a deep dive.

I cut into the archived data like a swimmer. I felt that moment of panic, that thought inside my brain announcing, “there’s too much here to process.” I immersed myself in it and dissolved myself in it. I could feel the rig above me shaking in its mounting bracket and wondered where the shaking was coming from. Some rough road maybe. I waited for it to pass.

But then it didn’t. The shaking became worse. As it did, I became aware of something long and sticky surrounding me and dragging me down the well of the archive. I was caught in something vegetal, and it felt thorny as well as slimy, and the slime was coating the inside of my throat as if I had strep real bad the way I did in fourth grade and the skin of my avatar began to burn—

“You’re in luck.”

Renata looked down at me and dabbed at my mouth with a thick white cotton disposable napkin, the kind of thing that reminded me of a dentist’s office crossed with a fancy cafe. Bright red blossomed on the cotton.

The truck idled on the side of the highway, and shook every now and then when another rig passed by.

Leaning forward into the front of the cab, Renata punched an honest-to-good steel switch on her dash—there wasn’t a touchscreen in sight—and the old green-on-black monitor warmed to life and displayed someone’s net handle and number. Renata looked at me. “My daughter operates a mobile surgery, and she’s hovering over Springfield right now. That’s about an hour away.” Renata looked up at Gloss, who was cabled to the backup substrates. “You think the kid can hold out that long?”

Gloss was nodding his head to the beat of some music we couldn’t hear. “Kid’s vitals look great,” Gloss said. “You skidded against a Nepenthe, little bro, not ice but a trap. Still, you shook it off. Between that and the ice you face-planted earlier in the run, you’re going to need a doctor sooner rather than later. But you can hold out another hour. You just rest.”

“Did I get the breakers?”

Gloss nodded soberly. “Yeah, man. There’s some good stuff in here. That Resheph practically did you a favor by wiping your old rig. Freed up room for new breakers, you feel me?”

I reached out my hand and Gloss took it. Renata clapped me on the shoulder and moved back behind the wheel and put the truck in gear.

I felt a pain traveling from my throat down to my gut. I tried to move on the bed but when I looked over I saw a wastebasket full of more of those cotton napkins, soaked dark red with old blood—my blood.

The sight of dried blood almost caused me to vomit. My hand found a metal tumbler of cold water in a recess next to the bed. The cold water hurt my teeth in a good, clean way.

The best part about it was that Gloss treated me like a real runner. He may still have called me “little bro” but he trusted me to make that run even after our rig was wiped and Enrique got snatched. It felt kind of childish to be thinking about that at the moment, with both Enrique and Freya in unknown locations, but I was proud of myself and I knew that Gloss was proud of me, too.

I may have slept a little because the next thing I knew the truck’s brakes were hissing and we were bouncing to a stop. Looking through the holograms and clear windshield, I could see a structure like a stainless steel capsule standing amid broken corn stalks on rubber-coated struts. The capsule sported a row of rings on the top, and next to it sat a small copter like a dragonfly. A miniature solar farm stood behind them.

A doctor in a white coat—Renata’s daughter—and two nurses in scrubs were moving quickly from the capsule to the truck. They helped me out of the bed and walked me into the capsule.

Inside it smelled like an aggressive germicidal agent. While the exterior of the capsule was polished aluminum, the interior was hard white plastic.

One of the nurses helped me up to an exam table while the other hit a switch and brought a multi-armed scanning apparatus down from the roof.

Renata’s daughter moved swiftly about the room, then stood before me. She was tall and tough and her blond ponytail swung as she moved. She washed her hands, then with her cold, dry fingers she pressed on my head, neck, chest, and stomach. She listened to my heart and breathing. She looked into my eyes and ears.

“I’m Dr. Adler,” she said. “You’re clearly someone who runs, considering that port and the chips under your fingers and the fact that you’re riding with my mom. So let’s take a look, OK?” She held up a cable tipped with something that could connect to my net port. I nodded my assent, and she plugged into me like Dad running diagnostics on the old Honda Warlock in the garage that he always swore he’d get running one day.

She swung an interface over to me. Manipulating it by sliding her hand into a polyhedral hologram, a familiar display appeared.

Resonance Scan Results Rawls, Jasper 19 year-old male FDWT NET OCULA L Serial *87 FDWT NET OCULA R Serial *10 PEGASUS BANK IND Serial *93 NOMFR FABRICYTES (BURNED)

No Serial Number

ACCU NET PORT Serial *22 GARNET FLUX CHIP (BURNED) PANOPT VISTA PROC (JAILBROKEN) Serial *74 OCBD SUBCUT SUBROU L1 serial *xx

9 DUPLICATE ENTRIES

NO OTHER IMPLANTS FOUND

“You’ve had some work done recently,” she said.

“Guess so. You see those oculars?”

“Unusual,” she said.

“What?” I became aware that I was staring at her face, her blue eyes and well-defined jaw. She seemed mischievous and casually cruel. Not what I wanted to see in my doc.

“Excuse me,” she said. “I meant your eyes are weird. You should see your face. You’re not used to doctors talking like this? You should hear us when patients are not around. Paramedics are even worse.” She flashed a brilliant smile.

“My eyes are tracking.” I tried to make it as serious-sounding as I could.

“That’s what eyes do.” She picked up one of those lights swung it back and forth. My eyes followed it for a moment then I waved it away. I was starting to get annoyed with her.

“I mean that my eyes are communicating with someone. Maybe one of the manufacturers. I don’t know.”

“You’re drawing serious heat.” She leaned in, lifted an eyelid gently, inspected me with her light.

“Yeah.”

“Which explains you, in your present battered condition, in my mobile surgery.”

“Yeah.”

She returned to her interface. She turned her wrist this way and that. The display switched to columns of numbers, nodal diagrams, schematics for circuits, faster than I could follow. She worked for what felt like a long time.

“I think I can shield you from the tracking routines,” she said. “It’s as simple as Faraday mesh contact lenses. There’s a place in town that can print them and run them over here by cycle courier. The only problem is your eyes won’t do what they’re supposed to do as long as you’re wearing them.”

“And what’s that?”

“Break big ice.”

I smiled. I shrugged. Hell yeah, I was a hotshot runner.

The CheRRy’s Guide to the Hardware Store

Name

Synaptic Upgrade

Manufacturer

Various

Legal status

Illegal except for licensed professionals working in law enforcement, national security, e-sports, and pornography.

Description

A series of injections followed by an operation involving the installation of more than a thousand nanoscale robots.

Cost

Close to the cost of a medium-sized house in an expensive city for a full upgrade; can be done a la carte, whatever that means

Function

Improves synaptic load, efficiency, speed, and resilience. Keeps runners alive in netspace, at least in the short term. Long-term effects unknown. Side effects include having a bad attitude and being totally fricking rad.