Chapter 3. Chrome Boutique

The child sitting on the other side of the wall of digital toy blocks glared at me. “Mommy knows how to deal with bad people like you,” he said.

I could feel fear trickle down my spine.

“Wait,” I said. “I’m not going to hurt you.” I didn’t want to face whatever he meant by “Mommy.”

The boy looked at me as if he might scream. Clearly, I wasn’t going to be able to get through this wall with speed or force, and if I waited too long, I would have this thing’s “Mommy” on my case. I had to think of something.

“Do you want to play?” I said.

“OK,” he said. He kept looking at me. His expression hadn’t changed.

I looked around at the blocks. I thought about the neighbor kids Freya used to babysit. “How about we play a stacking game?” I said.

“How do we do that?” the child said through the wall.

“First, we’ll need a pile of cubes. Do you think you can find one?”

“We can take a few from the wall if you promise not to come through.”

“I promise,” I said. Lying to this child felt wrong, but then again there was no way this could be a real child, was there? It must have been a child-shaped software construct. Yeah, just keep telling yourself that.

I remembered what Enrique and Gloss had told me. This was a FUTUR Design server. FUTUR Design simulated human brains.

The simulated child had already started to remove blocks from the wall. Some he left hanging on his side of the wall and some on mine. I began stacking them, slowly, awkwardly, manipulating them with an invisible hand. Meanwhile, the child had quickly built a tower as tall as himself and was removing more cubes from the wall.

“You’re so slow,” he said. “I’m awesome at this.”

“Bet you can’t build a tower twice as tall as you are,” I said.

“Oh yeah?” The child was moving almost too fast to see now, removing cubes and stacking them higher and higher. As the tower began to wobble, he removed even more cubes to make the base thicker.

There was now a gaping hole in the wall. I saw my chance.

Darting through the hole, at first I heard a strange silence, and then a scream of rage. “You promised!” the child shouted. “You promised!”

But when I looked back, the child was happily playing again, dismantling his tower and repairing his wall. He wasn’t chasing me, and wasn’t upset any longer. There was no Mommy in sight.

I still felt guilty but reminded myself that I wasn’t here to cause harm, only to explore at Enrique’s direction. I found myself able to accelerate as I neared the core of the city. As I reached the first of the towers, its outer layer, luminous and full of threads as if it had been woven from old fiber-optic cable, peeled itself open and let me inside. In a pleasurable rush I found myself awash in bewildering data, text and numbers and photographs passing over my eyes. I couldn’t make any sense of it—

—and suddenly I was on the couch in Enrique’s apartment again. The headset had been lifted from my eyes, and I looked up to find Gloss standing over me with a benevolent expression.

My legs were stiff, my mouth was dry, and more than anything I needed to pee. In the windows, the light was strange. It had been dusk when I had started but now, the sky was bright blue.

I looked at my watch. It was morning.

I sat up. “That was amazing.”

Gloss took a seat next to me, the couch creaking to accommodate his muscular body. He scrutinized my face, as if he were a teacher or an academic. “What did you experience?”

“When I got in, I saw pictures, words, numbers. I heard things, felt like I was in the lab. But everything moved at double speed, or even faster.”

Gloss pointed at the console. “We captured as much as we could.”

“Is it useful?”

“We can sell it for a little something. But money wasn’t the point. That was an under-protected remote server operated by a company not known for making reprisals. We put you there because it was safe.”

I felt somewhat disappointed. I wanted to be useful, to earn their trust, to be one of the boys. “What other kinds of servers are there?”

“Every megacorp operates big central servers: their headquarters or HQ, their research & development or R&D, and their trash, or corporate archives. The central servers are where they store projects and operations and assets and security measures that are inactive. When the corp wants to do something that takes time, it pushes the project out into a remote server with dedicated funding and staff. Their bigger projects will remain in a remote for some time, from days to years. But everything originates in the centrals.”

“Are the centrals well-protected?”

“It depends on the threats the corps expect, and on the nasty surprises concealed in those servers. For instance, R&D contains all of a corp’s new ideas, but it’s often under-defended because the valuable ideas are buried in there with all the usual, boring data that every corp keeps, such as how often the soap dispensers in the third-floor bathrooms are refilled.”

I thought about this for a while. There was something attractive about the idea of running a megacorp’s R&D server.

“I saw something else, before I made it in. A little boy building a wall of blocks.”

“You met Ludo.”

“He seemed to there to keep me out. But he wasn’t very good at his job.”

“Wasn’t he?” Gloss said, and looked up at the blue sky out the window. “How long do you think it took you to get through his wall?”

I was beginning to feel uncertain about myself. “I don’t know. It felt like five minutes, maybe fifteen, but it’s daylight out now, so—”

“It took eleven hours, Rawls,” Gloss said.

Eleven hours: the whole night and much of the morning.

“I don’t understand.”

“Time works differently when you’re jacked in. And when you’re dealing with simulant ice like Ludo, time gets weird. You can lose hours as if they were seconds.”

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“Ludo is ice?” I removed the console from my lap, stretched.

“That’s right.”

“What’s that other word? Simulant?”

“A synthetic human. Simulants are people, but they’re built instead of being born and they have a special connection to the net. They can access it without any additional hardware, and they can move through it like a dolphin through water. Some simulants live only on the net, such as Ludo.”

When I was a kid, I learned that simulants were robots, nothing more. As capable of independent thought as a coffee maker or a thermostat.

“I thought I was tricking him, but he tricked me.”

Gloss chuckled. “Don’t worry. Eleven hours is good for your first time. You must be very observant to make it through that quickly. Ludo is complexity-level four on the scale that we use. That means breaking him isn’t easy with an icebreaker. Without an icebreaker, most runners can’t get past that version of Ludo in any less than eight hours, or four hours per subroutine. Except for Wren,” he added thoughtfully, in a way that made me think there was something between Gloss and this runner named Wren.

“What’s a runner?” I said, though I suspected I already knew. There were streams about runners on some of the Real! channels. But those streams were always about gunplay, and the criminals always got caught in the end.

“A runner is someone who walks into corporate servers without authorization,” Gloss said.

“Like you?”

Gloss nodded. “And you.”

It warmed me to think that this huge, intimidating guy considered me, in some ways, a fellow runner.

I got up from the couch and excused myself. After exiting the bathroom, I took a look around the loft. It was a stunning place, with art on the walls, a vintage chandelier hanging from its two-story ceiling, and some very comfortable seating.

“Could I trouble you for a cup of coffee?” I asked Gloss.

“Usually, I’d say yes, but the boss is coming, and he wants you ready to go.”

“Enrique?” I said, remembering the new name.

“You got it. You have time for a shower if you’re quick. New clothes on your bed.”

“My bed?”

“There’s spare bedroom next to the office.”

The shower was the most luxurious I had ever felt: like a hot mist that made my skin tingle. After I had toweled off, I found a button-up shirt, a pair of nice, dark jeans, and a fine linen blazer on the bed in the guest room. Somehow they got my size just right. Checking myself out in the mirror, I could almost pretend to be Enrique himself.

I heard the front door open. “Is he awake? Is he ready to go?” came Enrique’s voice.

“Yeah, boss,” came Gloss’s calm reply.

I emerged from the bedroom and Enrique and Gloss both turned to me. “Looking sharp, my man,” Enrique said, employing some ancient slang that still felt good to hear.

“Thanks,” I said, shooting the cuffs of my jacket. “I’ve never worn anything this nice before.”

“If you’re going to join the outlaws, you’d better look the part,” Enrique said.

“About that.”

“Yeah?”

“Do I have to?”

Enrique came toward me and rested both his mechanical hands on my shoulders. “Have to what?”

“Become an outlaw.”

“That depends,” he said. “Do you want to find your friend?”

“I do, sir.”

“Data about this Freya Alexander is not going to be on any public-facing server. If there are any other traces of her, you’ll only find it in protected corporate facilities. And they don’t share their data. Ever. Not unless you have enough money to hire lawyers or to propose a joint business venture, and you don’t.”

“So the only way to find out—” I said, and waited for Enrique to finish my sentence for me. But he didn’t interrupt me. He waited for me to come to my own conclusion. “—is to break in and take it.”

Enrique nodded, then turned to Gloss. “We’re going out. It’s time to get the kid modded. We’ll be back later.”

Gloss gave a kind of mock-salute from his place on the couch, where he’d mysteriously manifested another steaming mug of tea in the last few minutes.

In the hallway outside the apartment, Enrique said, “Gloss needs his alone time. He gets cranky without it.”

“He said he was your intern.”

Enrique talked while they walked down the stairs. “That’s right. He’s a graduate student in network security at UNC. He’s working with me this year to gain a different perspective and to conduct his fieldwork. I’d like to think I can convert him away from academia, but you never know. It might be handy to have connections with the professoriat.”

“What does he study?”

“Ice. He’s our foremost scholar of the taxonomy of ice. His dissertation involves categorizing all known corporate ice. The Nguyen-Okafor scale was developed by Gloss’s advisors. It measures the complexity of ice, from zero, which is scarcely more than a password prompt, to eight, which is among the most advanced artificial intelligences in existence. Once you learn a little more, you should have a chat with Gloss about ice. He’d enjoy it, and you’d learn something.”

“You seem to think I’m going to be encountering more ice.”

“Well, aren’t you? I thought we’d been over this.”

I shrugged, and we hit the street. In the daytime, the neighborhood was quieter. Most people must have been at work. The music coming from the storefronts was softer, and the kitchens and food counters were not yet open. I found myself watching the sky for more camera drones, like the one that had intruded on us last night in the cafe.

“Can I ask you a question?” I said.

“You can ask.”

“OK. Last night, when that drone came, were you testing me?”

Enrique walked fast. I practically had to shout at him as I moved to keep up.

He looked back at me for a moment while walking. “Do you mean did I make that drone arrive?”

“I guess.”

“No, I did not. That was happenstance. But when it arrived, I realized that I could handle it my way, or I could give you the tools to deal with and see what happened.”

A bolt of pride flashed through me. “So it was a test.”

“And you passed.”

“What would have happened if I hadn’t?”

“I would have shared that image of your friend with you anyway, and then I would have sent you home. Then I would have called Dade and told him to stop wasting my time.”

Enrique was climbing a concrete stairway reinforced by a steel frame. I labored to keep up. As tiring as running in the net had been, running after Enrique in real life was just as exhausting.

It struck me that I hadn’t really slept since the night before last. And hadn’t eaten much, either.

“You said we were going to get me modded?” I said.

“You need to be modded to work. But we can’t be late,” he said.

When he climbed to the top, I followed him, and found myself on a raised plaza above street-level, crisscrossed by office workers carrying coffees and smoothies and eating pastries by a chattering fountain. Near the plaza was an enormous tower, about twice as tall as the twenty-first century skyscrapers ringing it, most of them vertical farm conversions, their windows darkened by plant growth within.

Enrique pointed out a small shape on the side of the super-tall tower, just a speck, but moving up in a way that did not appear to be mechanical. “Freerunner,” Enrique said.

Enrique and I walked to a low building next to one of the vertical farms, a bright white structure that looked like it had been made out of a particularly shiny and clean hard-shell plastic, like the outside of an injection-molded bathtub.

He walked right in. Inside was like a cross between a vape shop and a dentist’s office. Ionized, dead air made the place feel clean. Along the black-painted walls were cases full of small machinery made of surgical steel, tiny things with unknown functions connected to thin, gold wires or sharp spikes. Implants. Enrique moved through the boutique and opened another door, which revealed a teal-painted room and a reception desk.

The smell hit me right away: chemical and antiseptic. My heart started to beat faster. I felt uneasy, recognizing the signs—the hand sanitizer, the disposable masks and gloves—that this was a medical office.

I looked around the waiting room. Chrome and neon drew my eye, a thin band of light running around the top of the walls and slowly changing from color to color. It felt more like a tattoo parlour than a clinic.

The people waiting for their appointments looked like the people I grew up around. They were working people: truck drivers, machine operators, home health aides, and cooks. Aside from one guy in a suit, everyone else looked as tired as I felt. No one was here to be cool. I figured they all needed work done for their jobs.

What Enrique murmured to the receptionist, I didn’t catch, but before I even had a chance to take a seat in the waiting room, a woman in scrubs was calling us to an interior door.

In my experience, nothing good ever happened in medical offices. I looked at Enrique. How much did I know about him? What if he worked for the corps and was about to disappear me into the same labyrinth Freya was lost in?

I started to follow him and the woman in scrubs but I was thinking about turning around and running right out the door.

Gloss’s Encyclopedia of Ice Name

Ludo 1.0

Manufacturer FUTUR Design Cost to rez Medium-low Type Platform Subytype Simulant Effect Stops a run Subroutines 2