Chapter 30: Hotel Endless

“Hexrunner?” It was a word I’d heard before in reference to Sunya.

The Prophet Ezra squared his shoulders. His brilliant velvet cloak rustled, jangling with hardware concealed within its folds. He gestured for me to sit next to him on another milk crate.

“Hex as in a magic spell,” he said, “or perhaps you prefer the older word, hexe, a witch. You runners use your bodies as processors to do things that are as magic to not-runners. Or hex as in hexadecimal, the language you speak in your dreams. Or hex as the shape formed by all the motivations you might have: you run for money, status, revenge, justice, curiosity, expression. Some have one motivation that remains stronger than the others. Not you. You may think you do but you do not. You run in that zone between life and death. Not like the amateur runners, the dilettantes, who stay on the side of life, dip their fingers in criminality, and then bounce to corporate life. And not like those runners seeking their own braindeath, determined to make the corps kill them because they no longer want to live. Plenty of those around. You’re a rare one, one who remains in between. That makes you dangerous to yourself and your friends.”

His words scared me. I was getting used to people thinking I was just a kid. “Can you help me?”

He shook his head. “Maybe we can help each other. Slot this,” he said, and drew something familiar, a wafer of cultured flash memory, from his coat. He extended it to me. “Come back tomorrow and tell me what you find.”

“Will you tell me about Freya then?”

He shook his head once more. “Slot that, and I won’t need to.”

I held the strange wafer of circuitry in between my index finger and thumb. It was almost rectangular, except for one weird, melted-away corner. While it wasn’t exactly the same, I recognized its general shape, its organic copper streams and capillaries, from the memories of Freya that I had accessed.

I slipped it into my pocket and began walking out of the tent city. What I wanted was a nice place to sleep, somewhere calm and quiet and that would accept paper money. On the other hand, I wanted a good shower, something more than an old dripping pipe sticking out of the wall, and a place like that definitely wouldn’t accept paper money. I thought about it and decided to risk using my credit chip. I wanted the room for less than 24 hours anyway, and felt I could rely on the possibility that I was not that important of a target. My stomach queased at the thought. There was some uncertainty in that calculation.

Climbing the hill alongside the Private Highway pylons, I saw that there was a freerunner walking above, on the edge of the highway, at some odd angle only possible with suction or magnetic boots. Her hair was in a long, tight ponytail and she waved at me. I returned her wave. Then she was gone.

I saw downtown Bull City rising before me, its old red-brick textile mills converted into luxe condos, while green-glass towers rose behind it, wrapped in vines and dark with tree cover. Above those grew the rosy fungalcrete towers that housed and employed the modern workforce.

Amid the urban farms I found an old motel that had been converted into an upscale boutique. Slipping inside, I noticed the air become much drier, scented with something. The lobby was full of comfortable seating with only one person hanging out, a guy who looked like a business traveler in slightly shabby clothes, the cuffs of his blazer and slacks frayed, an exhausted look on his face as he sipped coffee and stared into space. The front desk was a small, waist-high molded plastic arch staffed by a young Black woman.

“A room, please,” I said.

“Reservation?”

“No.”

She looked me over, looked at the heavy case I was carrying, the torn-up bag on my shoulder.

“Permanent residence?”

I gave her my father’s address. She looked it up. For a long moment her eyes looked at her screen, blankly. I felt the momentary desire to remove my contacts, see if I could connect wirelessly to whatever she was looking at, futz with it until it said to give this man a room.

She gestured at the scanner casting purple light down in a short cone, asked for my wrist. I asked if she could take paper money instead.

“Credit only. For incidentals.” Her voice was customer-service smooth, neutral and bored as hell.

“What I figured.” I held out my wrist, speculated that I could get a good seventeen, eighteen hours of rest before the corporate machinery moved against me.

She looked at the screen with a neutral expression, but perhaps it was a slightly different neutral expression. “This says I’m not supposed to give you a room.”

“Does it say why?”

“Says your DNA is on the registry.”

Oh hell. If I had had the presence of mind to install a DNA Scrambler the last time I was in a medical installer’s office, I could have avoided that. I remembered what Gloss had said: being on the registry was permanent.

“Does it say which registry?”

“There’s only the one registry.” She looked up at me with calm eyes that said, I warned you, now it’s up to you to do what you will with that information. She mouthed the words “White Tree.”

My mind leapt back to that ice, the one that cut me on my way into the icebreaker archive. And that trap, the Nepenthe, installed in the archive. They had peered into me, transcribed me. Now the registry knew me.

“Let me ask you something,” I said. “How does someone on the registry get a place to sleep?”

“That’s the point of the registry,” she said. “You don’t. Not at a licensed establishment such as this fine hotel. Now, if someone not on the registry rented the room for you and allowed you to stay there, that might be different, as long as your DNA didn’t make its way into any of the collectors in the room.”

She spoke in such a calm, measured voice that it was like she was explaining cocktail bar perks to an executive. After everything I’d been through over the last few days, I was grateful just to be spoken to this way.

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“Where are those collectors?”

“In the drains.”

“And how do those drains communicate with—”

“With the registry?”

“Yes.”

“Through a standard net connection.”

“Thanks.”

I turned to the seating area and approached the businessman sitting there, still drinking his coffee. He looked like he had been on the road for weeks and his suit appeared as though it could use some repair. Aside from the worn cuffs, the wool was pilling and his tie was stained at the tip, as if he’d dipped it in a cup of coffee. In other words, he could use a bit of luck.

My own appearance was not much better. I wore a simple t-shirt and jeans, neither of which were all that clean. I smelled of long days of travel.

I sat down across from him. “May I buy you a cup of coffee?” I said.

I figured it was better to open that way, with a gesture of generosity toward him, rather than apologizing for interrupting him or asking for what I wanted.

“No thanks,” the man said and rubbed his face.

I reached into my pocket and produced a sheaf of cash. “No pressure, but I was wondering if I could interest you in the opportunity to make some money.”

He looked at the paper money. “I can tell you’re trouble. No one offers that much money without being trouble.”

“I can’t pretend I’m not trouble. But I’m having a little problem registering for a room here. If you were willing to get me a room for a day, I’ll give you three K.”

His brow wrinkled. “Three K is a lot. But how do I know you’re not on the registry?”

“As a matter of fact, I am on the registry.”

“No thanks, kid. I’m not looking to get renditioned over three K.”

I sighed, and excused myself to walk over to the counter, done up in curving laminate. I bought a cup of coffee. The pierced, green-haired barista poured it into a thick-walled ceramic mug and I carried it back to the businessman and breathed in the hot vapors. It would scald my tongue if I tried to drink it.

The businessman ignored me. Looked past me out the window.

I went to the bathroom, washed my hands, thought about Dr. Adler’s prohibition on jacking in, and then slipped the mesh contacts from my eyes. Back in the lobby cafe, my eyes rested on the businessman, went out of focus. Then something strange happened.

Like the corona of an old, orange street light in the fog, I could see the data streaming from him to all the devices listening in the room. And like a ray of afternoon sunlight filled with dust I could see the data streaming to him. The phone, the credit chip in his wrist, the work computer in his suitcase, the bone modem in his jaw, all were chattering even as he stayed silent. He was paying for daycare and streaming subscriptions, he was reporting on failed sales calls, he was getting a never-ending river of assignments from his boss, his partner was asking him if he was really coming home on time or if he would be delayed yet again. I could see all these things without looking at them.

As soon as I looked too hard, I could see nothing. When I let my eyes relax, I could see the corona of irritating, mundane business data again.

Except there was something sharper and redder that pinged his credit chip again and again, something trying to get through. It was a hospital and it was trying to extract payment. I followed the thin line of scarlet light to the router in the street that was streaming it through the window, and allowed my mind to follow it back along the lines and through a massive, beehive-like router at the top of the tallest tower in the Bull City district, and followed that back to the hospital, where rudimentary ice started to coalesce except for the pinhole where the beam traveled into the interior of the hospital server.

But I still had Hungry Creek, didn’t I? I spent a pittance to dissolve the simple frozen wall, an off-the-shelf 7Wonders product used by corps around the world.

I looked into the hospital records and found records of cancer treatments for a little boy, a little boy of seven years old, bald from chemo and playing a soccer videogame in his bed, alone but for a stuffed dinosaur.

The cancer treatments had gone unpaid-for, were not covered by insurance, and ran to the hundreds of K. Following the trail still further back, there were messages traded between billing and administration, discussing the possibility of forgiving the debt, and then one of the executives sent to another, “Bleed all the cancer patients. Make them all pay. No more charity care. They’ll find a way. I have my eye on another yacht, did I tell you that?”

In the heat of my anger, in the hot burst of saline that surrouned my eyes, I almost lost the thread. But the connection shimmered, wavered, and then held. The ledger appeared before me. I found accounts receivable. On that account, I saw the name of the businessman sitting before me, and I moved a decimal point over a few places. Then added a negative sign.

I blinked. That had never happened before. Dr. Qin had thought it was possible but I hadn’t actually believed her. If I could do that, what else could I do?

When I came out of netspace, I found to my delight that my coffee was still warm. I leaned forward. The businessman seemed to have been roused from his stupor and was looking at the pale green numbers glowing under the skin on the three-line display tattooed into his wrist.

“Excuse me,” I said. The man looked up, his eyes wet, his face childlike and full of wonder.

“I took care of your billing issue. I hope your son is going to be OK.”

The man leaned forward to meet me. Our foreheads were practically touching. “Thank you,” he said. “I don’t know how you did that, but thank you.” The moment stretched out. In a quieter voice he said, “Hey, he said, can I help you out now?”

I was thrilled to have breached some basic corporate server without a wired net connection. No, thrilled was not the word. I was intoxicated. The world felt sharp and bright. My lungs felt like turbines. My heart felt like a super-clean hydrogen pump.

“Look,” I said. “I don’t want to get you in trouble. I know people are relying on you.”

“Listen,” the man said. “If I draw heat from this I’ll just tell them you stole my identity.”

I smiled. “Do that.” And I handed over the paper money I was carrying before moving to the restroom to replace the contacts.

###

The room was everything I could have wanted. Natural sunlight came in through gaps in the towers. The linens and bathroom were ultra-clean and almost scentless. Best of all, the bed felt firm but comfortable under my aching muscles, and was bigger than any bed I had ever slept on.

It wasn’t a crash space, it wasn’t a spare room in Enrique’s apartment, it wasn’t an old farmhouse or motel room or a berth inside a van or a truck. It was a luxury hotel room, expensive as hell, and all mine for the next fifteen hours.

I set the case on the bed and opened the thick chrome latches. The two backup substrates glistened weirdly in the soft midday light.

I found the small, flat console in a small alcove in another case and plugged in the backups. For a while I tranced out in the miniature world of the console. Without a net connection, all that existed here were me and the substrates.

They were named Spider Wasp and Ichnovirus, a mutualistic icebreaker and virus combo, designed by an old anarchist according to the comments threaded through their genetic pseudocode. They circled me, almost menacingly.

The programs seemed to want to approach me where we hung suspended in the console’s interior netspace. They seemed to have agency, intentions, and personalities. Spider Wasp buzzed me, hovered. Ichnovirus approached slowly, drifting on digital currents. I knew that I was supposed to incorporate them into myself, to tune them to my biology, to make them mine, but I didn’t know how.

There was a part of me that was angry with Gloss for not spelling it out for me, but there was another part of myself that wanted to figure it out on my own.

I reached out for Spider Wasp, the tip of my arrowhead meeting the tip of its stinger. Pain—

The CheRRy’s Guide to the Hardware Store

Name

Bone Modem

Manufacturer

Various

Legal status

Legal

Description

A length of silicon and copper twisted around the jawbone.

Cost

One K, maybe less.

Function

Like any other phone except you can talk real quiet and the person you’re calling will still hear you. Also your boss can call your jawbone all the time and you can’t not answer. Use a disconnected hardware phone. And quit your day job.